La Ragazza di Praga

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La Ragazza di Praga

La Ragazza di Praga

original title:

La Ragazza di Praga

directed by:

cast:

Marie Havlova, Gabriella Pacini, Eloisa Pacini, Francesco Cascavilla, Federico Russo

cinematography:

Claudio Cascavilla

editing:

Ginevra Iuorio

production:

country:

Italy

year:

2024

film run:

20'17"

format:

colour

aspect ratio:

4:3

status:

Ready (10/04/2024)

festivals & awards:

  • Porto Femme International Film Festival 2024: Selezione Ufficiale - Miglior Documentario Internazionale
  • Come on Doc! 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Lavori in Corto 2024: Finalista
  • Contemporanea 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • ArteSettima Shorts 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Contemporanea International Film Festival 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Chiaroscuro International Film Festival 2024: Documentary - Finalista
  • Futures Connected 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Monstrale International Short Film Festival Halle 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Festival Kratkog Metra Novigrad 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Glocal Doc 2024: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Prague Film Awards 2025: Selezione Ufficiale
  • Visioni Italiane 2024: Premio D.E-R Visioni DOC
  • Visioni Verticali 2024: Miglior Documentario

Francesco and Eloisa, through old photographs, reconstruct the story of Maša and Gianlorenzo, their grandparents. She, an exile from the countryside of Prague, he, a rich Roman intellectual with a role at the Italian Embassy in Prague.
They two fell in love shortly before the Russians occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Thanks to Gianlorenzo's connections, Maša became the first Czech woman to obtain permission from the Communist party to marry a foreigner and therefore to obtain Italian citizenship. The situation gets worse and worse, the party’s rules become suffocating. They decide to leave Maša's family and move to Italy with their three children. Here, Maša enters the world of the Roman upper class, conservative and often judgmental. The fourth child is born. Something inside her breaks. All her choices, from that moment on, will be guided by an uncontrollable need for freedom. A freedom that a totalitarian government takes away from you and never gives you back.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
Prague’s Girl is the portrait of Maša, an 83-year-old woman with a difficult story behind her; the escape from Prague during the Russian occupation, the arrival in Italy and her loneliness. Her young nephews try to reconstruct their family's stormy past by opening a dialogue with memory, which is the real protagonist of the project. The filmic look, the sound and the graphics help to bring the viewer into a limbo suspended between present and past. Between truth and fairy-tale, metaphors that dance around the concept of how not faced traumas propagate over time like infinite and uncontrollable shock waves.