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:
distribution:
country:
Italy
year:
2024
film run:
20'17"
format:
colour
aspect ratio:
4:3
status:
Ready (10/04/2024)
festivals & awards:
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.