Concita De Gregorio, Esmeralda Calabria - Lievito madre. Le ragazze del secolo scorso

The questions of the girls of today find answers in the words of the girls of the past century. Lievito madre intertwines three generations, mixing the story of the film’s authors with those of the protagonists. From interviews with the main characters of our times, famous or unknown, from our home family movies – us, our mothers and grand mothers – to the interviews with the youngest generation, a story emerges, our story, told with one voice made up of many voices: the mother yeast that created us. Adele Cambria, Giovanna Tedde, Natalia Aspesi, Nada Malanima, Esterina Respizzi, Lea Vergine, Giulia Maria Crespi, Luciana Castellina, Benedetta Barzini, Giovanna Marini, Emma Bonino, Cecilia Mangini, Inge Feltrinelli, Dacia Maraini and Piera Degli Esposti reveal for the first time something very private: something about themselves.

Born from the need “to go back in order to move forward,” Lievito madre collects the testimonies—unpublished, free and often irreverent— of some of the protagonists of the Italian Twentieth Century met during the realization of Cosa pensano le ragazze (What Girls Think, Concita De Gregorio’s four-year-long project), which, through great team work collected a thousand interviews with women of all ages, about a hundred between the age of 60 and 100. Many of them are famous in their field—music, politics, literature, cinema—others are everyday women, their contemporaries. Faces, looks and words mix with images from family videos and compose a counterpoint of underground voices and a parallel tale.