Italian Cinema Today

Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, her films were gritty and unpolished, but they brought attention to the plights of marginalized people. Born in Mola di Bari on July 31, 1927, Cecilia Mangini relocated with her family to Florence  at the age of six, and then moved to Rome in 1952. There, she worked for a film club where she made personal and professional connections that would lay the foundation for the course of her life.    In the late 1950s, she partnered with Pier Paolo Pasolini for a trio of short documentaries that spoke of the poor living in desolation in the shadow of the industrial revolution.   The 1958 film, “Ignoti alla città” (Kids in the slums of Rome), documents the children of poor families living on the outskirts of Rome as they spend their days getting into mischief and searching for items of value in garbage dumps. An outspoken advocate for the poor, Pasolini wanted to show the other side of Italy's stereotypical image of its 1960s post-war boom with a