Cecilia Mangini, the Lady of the Documentary who told Grazia Deledda

Caterina Lucia

There are passionate women, whose hearts beat for freedom, revolution and true equality and shine with their own light even in the dark. Their light will never go out. At 93, left us a woman of extraordinary talent and strength: Cecilia Mangini, who has dedicated her life to militant cinema, an adjective that today “seems almost a dirty word”.

She was a photographer, essayist, screenwriter and director and her was the young gaze of a director who dared to get behind the camera to document the history of our country, an ever attentive and thoughtful gaze towards the last.
At the end of the 1950s, also thanks to the meeting with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cecilia Mangini turned her attention to a new urban space, that of the villages in the period of the economic boom. Thus were born Ignoti alla città (1958), Stendalì (1960), La canta delle marane (1962).

She entered the houses, talked with people, recorded the last testimony of the Apulian ritual crying in Martano, a very small town in Salento, in the wake of the meeting with Ernesto De Martino. Cecilia Mangini's strength lay in giving a voice to those who lived on the margins, showing the desolation of the countryside devastated by the concrete of the suburbs, recording the last moments of life of the rituals of peasant and pre-Christian culture, swept away by the advent of civilization industrial and consumption.

She was a revolutionary director also dedicated an extraordinary documentary to the Nobel Prize-winning writer Grazia Deledda. A distant dialogue between women, united by their closeness to the least and by the choice to emancipate themselves through art.
"For me, reading her books, when in the 50s there were only romance novels for women, was subversive", says Mrs. Rock of the documentary who has always continued to fight with her cinema the loss of memory and critical sense of our present.

That one on the Deledda was a job that, day after day, took more and more form and substance. The title is strongly evocative "Grazia Deledda, words and colors" and the focus centered on a sort of meeting / reflection between two "monuments" of twentieth century Italian culture is extraordinary: Grazia Deledda and Cecilia Mangini.

Her disappearance marked the end of a very important historical and revolutionary period. The condolences were unanimous for such a strong and breaking personality.