‘Every Italian recognised a piece of their own family’: film on abuse of women touches a nerve
In a packed cinema in Rome, the casual cruelty of the slap stunned the audience into an uneasy silence.
It was the opening scene of C’èancora domani(There’s Still Tomorrow), the directorial debut by the comic actor Paola Cortellesi, which had just been released after opening at the Rome film festival.
Lying in bed, the slap across the face was Ivano’s response to his wife, Delia, played by Cortellesi, bidding him “good morning”.
The gesture set the tone for the 1940s-set black-and-white film’s depiction of poverty, domestic violence, women’s rights and a mother’s determination to break the cycle of abuse in post-second world war Rome.
Audiences are more accustomed to Cortellesi, who co-wrote the film, making them laugh rather than slapping them with hard-hitting themes, which made the phenomenal box-office success of C’èancora domani– it is among Italy’s Top 10 highest-grossing films ever – a surprise, even for her.
“I’m still struggling to get my head around it,” Cortellesi told the Guardian before the film’s release in France on Wednesday, the first country in its international circuit.
“People keep saying: enjoy the present! But I’m not able to … it’s as if I’m spinning inside a sort of hurricane that has taken me everywhere. This success is something which might never happen in a director’s entire career. It happened to me with my first film … you just hope that a lot of people will watch it.”
That hope certainly came to pass:
C’èancora domani, which picked up three awards at the Rome film festival including the special jury prize, has been watched by more than 5.3 million people in Italian cinemas. The film has drawn cinemagoers from across the generations and 45% of the audience has been male. After France, it is due for release in more than 17 other countries, including the UK on 26 April. The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, praised Cortellesi for a “courageous” film. Headteachers have written to her saying they want to show it to their students.
C’èancora domani is set in 1946, the year Italian women were able to exercise their right to vote for the first time – in a national election and a concurrent referendum on abolishing the monarchy on 2 June.
Cortellesi said she wanted to make the film, partly inspired by her grandmothers’ stories of that period, in the past in order to raise issues that persist in Italian society amid a lingering toxic machismo.
She believes the film has been successful because it touched a nerve among Italians, adding that the thirst for debate was instantly palpable during her talks with cinema audiences