Marco Bellocchio
Italy | 2023 | 105 min
Language : Italian
Subtitles : French, English
Sorelle Mai is a gift of a film. It offers spectators a glimpse into the early years of the director’s daughter, Elena Bellocchio, whose charisma overflows on screen. This gentlest of stories unfolds over a ten-year-long shoot, entirely dedicated to its protagonists. Sorelle Mai drifts, intangible – just like life.
In a first essay made in 1997, Elena, Marco Bellocchio was already filming his very young daughter thanks to a clever and reflective device: there she was, barely two years old, discovering the first days of her life via a camcorder. Elena was already crystallised in film fiction. Sorelle Mai is a refreshing and attentive film that continues this momentum by grasping the long, yet too short, time of childhood through the prism of a shoot spread over ten years in Bobbio, showing the charismatic Elena growing up before the filmmaking eye of her father. The six segments or snapshots of a moving childhood that form its subject matter, are as many ways of showing its disarmed adults, forced to refrain from acting, as if offering themselves to the camera. It is a gentle story, written around its characters, all carefully plucked from the filmmaker’s close circle, offering proof that kindness is less a subject to be conquered than it is a method to be adopted. Just like life, Sorelle Mai drifts, intangible.
Pierre Guidez