A film festival is a place where all times and all possible universes coexist. We confirmed it again yesterday at the premieres of the Berlinale, the veteran Berlin competition, when passing through the delicious Glory! , an Italian period film about the adventures of a group of girls who learn music in an impoverished 18th century orphanage, to the science fiction of Spaceman , an American drama played by Adam Sandler in the role of an astronaut who befriends a large alien spider. Glory! competes for the Golden Bear in the main section and was saluted, while Spaceman premiered in the Berlinale Special section, very versatile in terms of formats and content, and which does not award awards.
Glory! , the debut feature of Italian singer-songwriter Margherita Vicario, is a fable about female creative rebellion, set in the year 1800 in a religious boarding school on the outskirts of Venice where music is taught to orphan girls. The notables of the place decide that the priest and teacher of the hospice compose a piece on the occasion of the visit of the new Pope, but the aforementioned – played by the comedian Paolo Rossi -, apart from being an arrogant abuser, is a mediocre musician. The date is approaching and he cannot compose anything.
At the same time, a maid endowed with a secret natural talent for music finds a pianoforte in the basement – ??an instrument from the late 17th century, a precursor to the current piano – and plays it daily. Four inmates discover her and there is born, not without tensions, the happy conspiracy of the quintet of unfortunate women who aspire to get out of confinement and make a living from music, played by the actresses Galatéa Bellugi, Carlotta Gamba, Veronica Lucchesi, Maria Vittoria Dallasta and Sara Mafodda .
There is drama and there is comedy; There is lightness and there is depth. And the repertoire we listen to includes scores from the time, but also pop music. “This is a fable, not a historical film; “Those boarding schools, which existed and in which there were musical virtuoso women, are a real pretext to create the fable, and that has allowed me to introduce the pop of my work as a singer-songwriter,” explained Margherita Vicario at a press conference with great part of the cast. Vicario (Rome, 1988) has two power pop albums to her credit: Minimal musical (2014) and Bingo (2021). Her debut with Gloria! , an Italian-Swiss co-production, was highly applauded yesterday at its screening before the specialized press.
In another film released yesterday in competition at the Berlinale, ‘Black Tea’, multiple cultures, languages ??and co-producing countries come together. In the film we follow a young woman from the Ivory Coast (Nina Mélo) who, on her wedding day, dumps her boyfriend and starts a new life in China. She finds employment in a tea shop, with whose owner (Chang Han) she begins a romantic relationship. Her son, captivated, calls it black tea.
“I wanted to show a side of Africa that is not seen and a migration that is not necessarily economic,” its director, Abderrahmane Sissako, born in Mauritania and naturalized Malian, said at a press conference. Sissako criticized the persistence of “a Eurocentric view” when “there is a world beyond Europe.” He also wanted to show “women in search of freedom and their ability to overcome difficulties” in a film that also addresses racism, in this case between Chinese and black people.