Mama Mercy: in Sala Assoli the film by Alessandra Cutolo dedicated to the mothers of the Southern world

IAlessandra Cutolo's film overturns the classical sacred iconography of the mother in a contemporary multicultural setting.

After the preview at the 41st Turin Film Festival and the great success of the Roman screenings at the Cinema Troisi, Mama Mercy, the first feature film by Neapolitan Alessandra Cutolo, finally arrives in Naples, Wednesday 15 May at 20.00:XNUMX pm in Sala Assoli, as part of Altre Visioni, curated by Angelo Curti, in conversation with the author.

The film benefits from the precious photography of Luca Bigazzi, made in 4K format, using only two cell phones. Most of the performers come from Women Crossing, a mixed formation of migrant and Italian actresses founded by Alessandra Cutolo. Set in Rome in the housing occupations beyond the Prenestino, a microcosm where, over the years, hundreds of families from every South of the world have converged with their load of expectations, pain and children, the film tells the story of the small metropolitan odyssey of Mama Mercy, a breathless and inconclusive journey through the folds of the city of the rich, armed only with her unstoppable energy as a mother fighting for the future of her children.

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Cost of the ticket 5 euro.

Info and reservations: 345 467 9142 – [email protected]

At the end of Prenestina, in Rome, where the road ends, a huge mirrored building towers like a spaceship or a ghost ship. It is an old abandoned hotel that has been occupied for a long time. Over the years, hundreds of families from every south of the world have converged in that microcosm, with their burden of expectations, pain, children. That former hotel is the backdrop to a rich, tragic and joyful intersection of destinies. Mama Mercy has too many children and a husband who helps her little. Every day she mixes up her steps with the intrepid and breathless ones of dozens of other squatting mothers - Ethiopians, Sudanese, Moroccans, who are struggling to give their children a dignified future. Mama Mercy's dream would be to have an extra room, and allow her family to "expand" from the few square meters that have been assigned to them. The building is a city within a city where solidarity, competition, misery and nobility intertwine.

“Motherhood is the element that gives rise to action – explains director Alessandra Cutolo. The classic sacred iconography of the mother is overturned and reinterpreted in a multicultural, vital and marginal contemporary world. A new world appears in history, made up of women and children who repopulate old abandoned buildings in Rome. Women who come from various Souths of the world, try to extricate themselves from complex existences, bring with them the trauma of crossing the Mediterranean. New philosophies arise from attempts to give answers to the meaning of everyday events. The past resurfaces in the present and a sort of universal balance regulates good and evil. New laws regulate relationships. Poverty and need produce infringements of the rules. The infringement produces sanctions from the new administrators of the rule. The element of salvation comes from the unexpected entry into play of a different type of marginal subjectivity. The sanction produces repentance and solution”.

Alessandra Cutolo was born in Naples, she studied Romance Philology. In the 90s she collaborated with Martone, Servillo, De Rosa between cinema and theater as an assistant set designer, property manager, assistant director. From 2000 she worked for ten years in the Lauro prison with the Liberanti theater company, experimenting with theater direction in contexts of social marginalization. Then she combined theater with casting work collaborating with Garrone in "Gomorra", with Ferrara in "Napoli Napoli Napoli", with Di Costanzo in "L'Intervallo", "L'intrusa" and "Aria ferma", with Pietro Marcello in "Bella e Perduta", In Rome she founded the theater company Women Crossing, a mixed formation of migrant and Italian actresses with whom she staged adaptations of African literary texts of the Sudanese, Nigerian and Ethiopian tradition. In 2020 she won the Asini award. "Mama Mercy" is her first feature film as a director.