Anna Villari

Gabriele D'Annunzio - poet, novelist, playwright, journalist, soldier and politician - shaped Italian artistic, political and military life either side of 1900. Filmed entirely at the Vittoriale degli Italiani, the hillside citadel above Lake Garda where he spent his final years, the documentary moves through the house, the archive, the park, the amphitheatre and the mausoleum. Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the Vittoriale foundation, leads a chaptered account of D'Annunzio's writing, his affairs, his politics and his military exploits, closing on his uneasy relationship with Mussolini, who admired and feared him in equal measure.

Cipria is a ghost film: three Italian women who lived during fascism had told their lives hoping they could become a film, but the war had shattered the dream. We didn't even have an image of them: only the stories, still current, of their lives, which had been waiting for eighty years to be seen and heard. The challenge was to visualize their stories with footage shot between the 1920s and 1940s and new footage, to give each of them a face, a voice and a body.