“Daughter of Mine” by Laura Bispurri

Film screening and discussion | Free with registration.

Vittoria, a shy 10-year-old girl, spends the summer on the windswept Sardinian coast with her loving-but-overprotective mother Tina (Valeria Golino). Vittoria begins to suspect that the local party girl Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher) is her actual birth mother, a revelation that upsets her innocent childhood existence. When financial difficulties force Angelica to leave town, Vittoria forges a brief, powerful relationship with Angelika, setting off a dramatic summer in which she finds herself torn between two imperfect mothers.

Genre: Drama
Year: 2018
Country: Italy
Duration: 97′
Language: Italian with English subtitles

The screening will be introduced by prof. Anna Marra, Senior Lecturer of Italian, of the Department of French and Italian at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include Dante Studies, Medieval and Contemporary Italian literature, social justice, gender and identity, digital humanities, meditation, storytelling, and foodways. At the end of the film, there will be a Q&A with the audience.

Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Chicago International Film Festival, the Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago presents the retrospective ITALIAN WOMEN DIRECT, featuring a selection of films by Italian women directors that have been presented at the Festival through the past 60 years. With a weekly free screening, the Institute invites the audience to rediscover the history of Chicago’s longest running film festival, while learning how Italian women helped shape contemporary cinema, and contribute to ongoing discourses on representation in the film industry. Each title represents diverse themes, styles and narratives that all together provide a snapshot of the evolution of Italian cinema over more than half a century.