The 19th century was very strict for women. They were considered the property of men. Married women could not make a career even with their own money, because you had to ask for authorization for anything.”
Maria Montessori (1870-1952) managed to escape the male yoke, although she paid a very high price for her independence. Léa Todorov (Paris, 1982) – daughter of the prestigious philosopher Tzvetan Todorov – worked “on a documentary about how pedagogy changed in the interwar period. Montessori was one of the protagonists, I researched her and realized that her personal life was also very interesting, because she is an example of how women are always divided between the professional world, the private world and the will to be free” .
With the result of that research, Todorov wrote the script and then directed Maria Montessori, a film that delves into the most intimate facet of the pedagogue. The film, which went through the BCN Film Fest last week and is now coming to the big screen, begins in Paris in the 1900s, where Lily is a star of the stage. Men worship her, fall at her feet and fight in duels for her. But Lily is hiding a secret, she has a daughter, Tina, who suffers from mental retardation. He has kept her away, but when the girl returns home, Lily finds herself forced to run so that no one discovers the girl’s existence.
She takes refuge in Rome and there they tell her about a doctor who can help her, Maria Montessori. The young Italian has studied medicine at a time when women’s access to university is practically prohibited. Montessori maintains a loving relationship with a colleague, Giuseppe Montesano, and together they run a center where they teach children with special needs.
Montessori is convinced that her students can learn just like any other child and has developed a method to facilitate their learning. But, like Lily, Montessori also hides a secret: she has a two-year-old son from her relationship with Montesano. A son who is being raised in the countryside with another family. She wants to have him by her side, but she can’t.
Montesano proposed marriage to Montessori, but she did not want to marry, because marriage would have ended her professional life. Nor could he raise the child at his parents’ house, because that would have embarrassed them”, adds the producer.
Little by little, Lily, a fictional character, and Montessori become friends and find ways to help each other. “Lily was important to me because she’s a woman who is forced to deal with a daughter with special needs and doesn’t even know where to start. I also have a daughter with special needs, and it seemed like a good starting point for the film,” says Todorov.
Tina has ended up in the perfect place, because Montessori has managed, thanks to her method, that her students, “who were evicted by the prevailing school system, learn to read, write or add”. “The Montessori method encourages the child to learn and compare while touching objects, allows him to order through experimentation and facilitates him to assimilate things by himself”.
Todorov emphasizes that his film “is not a film about the method and if someone goes to the cinema to see it with this idea, they will be disappointed”. But he does defend the system invented by Montessori, which “is far from what still prevails in many places in France where you have to learn things by heart and the teacher believes that all students must do it the same way” .
Her own daughter has benefited from this form of teaching and is also one of the actresses in the film, “the one who cries, because I can’t let the children cry, only mine”, she smiles. Maria Montessori’s team began working with the children who are part of the cast “long before filming began, we set up a workshop where there were five and six children and adults and also a choreographer and musicians, we fostered knowledge with each other because the relationship between the children was fundamental, and then we rehearsed the scenes and looked for the perfect one so that each one could show their abilities and feel comfortable at the same time”.
