Cecilia Mangini

A piece based on Mangini's photographs of a journey that would change her life: the one she took at the age of 25 to the pumice mines of Lipari, a lunar landscape displaying extreme working conditions that she portrayed in 46 images both beautiful and devastating.

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Third and last episode by Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra in which they investigate what Italians think about sex and gender. Now, the questions focus on the notion of modesty and on the meaning given to the sacrament of marriage.

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Series inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore. This time, Italian people are confronted with though questions about sex before marriage, extramarital affairs and homosexuality.

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Twenty years after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore, Cecilia Mangini and Lino Del Fra once again investigate what Italians think about sex and gender. They travel through the country and gather opinions and testimonies, resulting in a complex portrait of a society in-between progress and tradition.

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Roman township of San Basilio: Fabio, 7 years old, in Italian a "character", is assigned to a differential class. How the family reacts, what the neighbors say, what the teachers, the principal, the psychologist of the elementary school think: the doubt is that there is no re-education of a child at stake, but the green light for social homologation.

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A reportage on the “popular walk of Vignola”, a non-competitive and popular race that challenged the rhetoric of competition and the myth of sport as discipline. The joyful interviews to the participants portray an Italy looking for a sense of community and deep social connection.

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The core values of the Olympic Games are excellence, friendship and respect, with a view to build a better world by promoting sport. Exploring the history of the Games and the relation between sport and the building of a national identity, Mangini exposes the appropriation of these ideals by fascist movements, cultural imperialism and capitalism.

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Two young militants in love try to link their ideals to their everyday life together. A reflection on the attempt to combine love, intimacy and revolution.

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In 1967, Nino Benvenuti wins the boxing world championship, becoming a myth among young Italian men from the working class. They start seeing sport as a chance to break free from a life of poverty, hunger and heavy industrial jobs. The first episode of a series Mangini made about the struggles of young men looking for a better future.

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Second part of the series Mangini dedicated to boxing as a possibility for the social rescue of young Italians. In the south, shepherds train by running after sheep and gyms are improvised. In Rome, young Roma people struggle against discrimination in the ring. In the north, a father trains his son so that he can achieve the victories the father missed.

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A work commissioned by the Ministry of Labour to which Mangini brings an eloquence that transcends any propaganda ambition. It is an accurate portrait of a vision about a land of new highways and factories built on the grounds of shepherds and farmers.

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Initial panorama of Brindisi, a city with a peasant tradition. The petrochemical, city within a city. Children in poor neighborhoods, workers' voices: the crisis, the layoffs, the need for the recommendations of the Christian Democrats to enter Montecatini. Wealthy men and women binge at the restaurant. Voices of agrarians, forced to leave the earth to make room for the petrochemical. A ballroom. In a puppet theater, a show is staged in which the worker is addressed as "starved". At a course for foremost workers, various compliant testimonies follow one another: Monteshell is a large industry, and no one has any criticisms against it. But another worker, elsewhere, with his face in the shadows, confesses that everyone is afraid to speak, skilled workers get the same pay as simple ones, 400 colleagues have been fired, union activists are "special supervised", and going on strike is a business. 35mm b/w

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The industrial city of Brindisi is the setting for this film, the tension between the bright promises of the industrial world and the not-so-bright reality of a young worker, in one of Mangini's most emblematic works.

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This documentary is one of the earliest film enquiries on women's condition in Italy, seen in its different aspects: social, economic, psychological. Starting from an analysis of the feminine role models proposed by the cultural industry, the film finds its protagonists among all kinds of women.

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The Italian unification, also known as Risorgimento, took place between 1815 and 1870. During this period, caricature was a privileged medium for political commentary. From Napoleon III to Garibaldi, no one escaped the caricaturists, who also resorted to drawing to talk about the new legal system, the emancipation of women or the freedom of the press.

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A commission by the public company responsible for the Italian motorways on the theme of road safety. Irony and drama come together in the narration of the Grande Raccordo Anulare (ring road) of Rome.

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Trieste, after being liberated from the fascist regime, seems to have been forgotten by the rest of the Italian Republic. Mangini investigates the state of affairs of the city: economic underdevelopment, delicate political situation and social impoverishment.

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The film begins at night, as parishioners holding lanterns form a series of processions, travelling through the night from Rome, and villages in the Abruzzi and Lazio regions, to make it to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, 10 miles from the capital, by morning. More than an anthropological study of ecstatic devotion – with its genuflecting disciples, and women who scream desperately at the sky – Divino Amore also speaks to Mangini’s interest in disappearing rituals and communities at risk of extinction. When generations of worshippers pour out of the church at the end of the service, formality dissolves into secular leisure, as families perched on horse carts eat plates of spaghetti and men fall asleep on the grass. The velvet-clad austerity of the church’s interior gives way to a series of pastoral tableaux.

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Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.

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On a hot summer day, a group of boys of the Roman suburbs play and laugh in one of the many rivers that surround the city. The camera scrutinizes them, approaches them, reveals the gestures and glances, wraps them in a sort of visual dance, while the words of the commentary (entrusted to the poetic sensibility of Pier Paolo Pasolini) narrate the stories, desires, dreams, the future.

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A unique 1960s documentary on the traditional dirge sung by women in Griko, an ancient dialect of Salento, so old that it originates from the ancient Greeks who once colonized that part of southern Italy.

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A day in the life of Maria, an old woman who lives on a farm in Puglia. She is not afraid of death, the gestures and actions that fill her days give meaning to time.

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An expressionist and hypnotic vision of a disconcerting rural ritual in Lucania, the symbolic slaughter of a goat, a collaboration between Mangini and her husband and partner Lino Del Fra.

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The second film by Cecilia Mangini is based on the words of neo-realist writer Vasco Pratolini. It alternates between documentary and the reconstruction of autobiographical moments to paint an image of the Florence of his youth, and to show us his take on the effort of growing up and the risk of falling in love.

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The life, the problems, the hopes of the ragazzi of the suburbs of Rome. Ignored by the city, these young men spontaneously express their vitality, their violence, their willingness to put themselves at risk. They are at the center of "Ragazzi di vita", the first novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, author of the text of this documentary.

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The story of Cecilia Mangini, documentary maker, photographer and intellectual who told thirty years of Italy's history with her films.

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The film begins at night, as parishioners holding lanterns form a series of processions, travelling through the night from Rome, and villages in the Abruzzi and Lazio regions, to make it to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, 10 miles from the capital, by morning. More than an anthropological study of ecstatic devotion – with its genuflecting disciples, and women who scream desperately at the sky – Divino Amore also speaks to Mangini’s interest in disappearing rituals and communities at risk of extinction. When generations of worshippers pour out of the church at the end of the service, formality dissolves into secular leisure, as families perched on horse carts eat plates of spaghetti and men fall asleep on the grass. The velvet-clad austerity of the church’s interior gives way to a series of pastoral tableaux.

Open details →

Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.

Open details →

A unique 1960s documentary on the traditional dirge sung by women in Griko, an ancient dialect of Salento, so old that it originates from the ancient Greeks who once colonized that part of southern Italy.

Open details →

A day in the life of Maria, an old woman who lives on a farm in Puglia. She is not afraid of death, the gestures and actions that fill her days give meaning to time.

Open details →

The life, the problems, the hopes of the ragazzi of the suburbs of Rome. Ignored by the city, these young men spontaneously express their vitality, their violence, their willingness to put themselves at risk. They are at the center of "Ragazzi di vita", the first novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini, author of the text of this documentary.

Open details →