GLI APPUNTI DI ANNA AZZORI / UNO SPECCHIO CHE VIAGGIA NEL TEMPO
PerSo Award

International Title: The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror that Travels through Time
Director and Screenplay: Constanze Ruhm
DoP: Hannes Böck
Editing: Hannes Böck, Constanze Ruhm
Sound: Gaël Segalen
Productor: Constanze Ruhm

Italian premiere

Constanze Ruhm’s essay film revolves around another film: Anna by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli (Berlinale Forum 1975). In the early 1970s, the two Italian directors found Anna Azzori, a drifter who needed money and help, on the Piazza Navona in Rome. As they documented her unravelling life, control over the process remained firmly in their hands.

Starting with this material, Gli appunti di Anna Azzori constructs several clusters of ideas that are sometimes more, and sometimes less related to one another: “Everything is at once far away and very close,” we hear at one point. The leitmotif raises the question of the place of women and their struggles in a world that was full of discrimination at the time – and which still is today. The film uses interference noise, elaborate voiceovers, snowy images, characters who turn into trees, rocks or stars (and back again), river nymphs and young women at a casting call. It also features lots of archival material, including images from feminist demonstrations in Italy: “We are not afraid,” the demonstrators chanted at the time.