Director: Alina Marazzi
Author: Alina Marazzi
Country: Italy
Year: 2007
Duration: 84′

Subject:
Anita, Teresa, and Valentina never met. They lived in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, at different ages and in distant cities. Yet their true stories, recorded in private diaries, form an ideal continuity, bearing witness to family and political struggles, personal and collective, to assert autonomy, identity, and rights in a patriarchal country.
In 1964, Anita is an adolescent, a good girl from a well-to-do family. She is shy and reflective. She often locks herself in her room at night and confesses to her diary all her sense of inadequacy and fragility. “The family downstairs invited us: tonight I have to go dancing for the first time! I’m terribly scared, stomach ache and all. How old am I?? Almost seventeen!! … and yet I was incredibly brave!”.
While outside the bourgeois apartment in affluent Milan, her peers begin to experience autonomy and rebellion, she withdraws and grapples with the dictates of a bourgeois, authoritarian, and moralistic culture. Anita would like to discover love and sex, but the education she received inhibits her, preventing a full and conscious experience of her body and her life.
Teresa, on the other hand, has already discovered love and sex, and at only twenty years old she became pregnant. What to do? How to manage an unwanted pregnancy in a Southern culture like that of her family? “For another woman this moment could be one of great happiness. But not for me. For me it is tragedy. For me it is the end. I think only of my father, my mother, and that it would be better to die.” Teresa decides to have an abortion, and thus the right she was fighting for alongside her collective comrades is no longer a slogan but becomes part of her life, given that abortion in 1976 is illegal. She leaves her town in the South and goes to Rome: majestic, alienating, and now hostile, she walks through its noisy streets and dense buildings. Teresa will experience a clandestine abortion, performed in an anonymous room, on a cold examination table, by an unknown gynecologist. She will record in her diary the feelings and reflections of a practice that will soon become a right, no longer abstract for her.
Valentina was born in Rome, lives there, and operates as a feminist activist, active in circles and collectives, well known at “Governo Vecchio.” She lives her thirties intensely, always relating the “personal to the political,” seeking to find a possible balance between the muses of separatism and a full and shared love story with a man. One evening she is with her Francesco, finally intimate, but a phone call distracts her: a commando of comrades has kneecapped a gynecologist. She must run, hoping to find her love story waiting for her upon return.
But Valentina is aware that this great conflictual period of struggles and passions, politics and sex, is ending because, as she writes in her diary: “We are defeated, men and women, after 1977, and I think the real effects will be slow to settle in our consciences.”
These three women do not know each other, but their testimony shares the same tension and moves, unknowingly, in a single direction: a generational upheaval that took individual and private conceptions of life and the world and fused them into a collective and public vision. The 20 years that changed everyone’s life.

Type: Documentary
Format: DVD
Language: Italian and English
Availability: available for purchase:
MIR Cinematografica Via A. Anfossi 36 – 20135 MILAN Tel. 02 37059000
Notes: Source DVD + book
Availability: the video is available at the Badaracco Foundation (location V MAR);
available for purchase: MIR Cinematografica Via A. Anfossi 36 – 20135 MILAN Tel. 02 37059000