Porpora Marcasciano

A journey into the largest and oldest transgender community in Europe — that of Naples — told through the voices of six femmenelle, suspended between centuries-old rituals and contemporary tensions.

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It often happens that at the moment of death, transgender individuals are shorn of their identity. Their families are ashamed, the funeral takes place in secret, and on the tomb appears the name the deceased had before their transition, in one stroke nullifying the entire life path they had chosen. The same thing happened to Antonia. Her girlfriends gather to honor her memory and give her back her identity denied. In telling her story, the film’s stars, all drawn from the variegated transgender world, interweave the narrative with tales of their own lives, experiences, and memories.

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From her roots in Southern Italy to her landing in Bologna, the trans leader Porpora Marcasciano relives her self-discovery, from a negated identity to battles for human rights.

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Italy, 1970. An increasing legion of harmless warriors begins a peaceful struggle for sexual freedom through pornography, shaking and shocking religious authorities and conservative political institutions. They are ironic, happy, crazy. They are dreamers, defenders of definitive communion between body and soul. But they were censored and humiliated. They were mistreated and arrested for demanding loud a new cultural renaissance.

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On November 24 in 1979 a brand new event took place in Pisa: the police gave permission to stage the first national gay parade, organized in collaboration with the City of Pisa. The march was an unexpected success, with hundreds of gays and transgender people coming from every part of Italy. They paraded openly and the city was partly friendly and partly hostile. This documentary features personal memories and political comments from the past to the present. Using images of contemporary society and exclusive archival material, twelve people, participants and organizers, recall how that historic day was created, its relevance and consequences for their own lives and for the gay community as a whole.

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Poet and writer Antonio Veneziani, the youngest representative of the Scuola Romana literary current, which was championed by Pasolini and Moravia and included counter-culture artists such as Dario Bellezza and Renzo Paris, is writing a book of interviews with transsexual people. As he meets with people from varied and sometimes contrasting paths of life, he also begins a quest to find where his late friend Vinicio Diamanti, a well known actor who has often performed in drag, has been buried. A meditation on Life, Death and the need for a new law in Italy through the prism of the trans-gender experience.

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Bearing witness to the transition from woman to man that the director experienced between the late 1990s and 2005. Cangelosi began working on the project thinking of it as a kind of visual diary that would follow him step by step through his own physical and psychological transformation. The film, reimagined in editing at the end of the director’s personal story, reconstructs it by interweaving it with part of the historical events and political struggles that have taken place within Italian society over the past two decades.

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