(2025, Italy, USA, 90')
The first female director in Italy to embark on a career in the pioneering world of early cinema – about ten years after American filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché – Elvira Notari, together with her husband Nicola, founded Dora Film in Naples in 1906. With this production company, she made over sixty works of strong realist impact, set against the natural backdrop of Naples. Valerio Ciriaci’s documentary retraces her professional story, from her remarkable success – also in the United States, among immigrants in Manhattan’s Italian quarter – to her withdrawal, brought about by the advent of sound cinema and Fascist censorship.