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DONNE DI MAFIA MINI FILM FESTIVAL @RIVERSIDE STUDIOS


  • Riverside Studios 101 Queen Caroline Street London, England, W6 9BN (map)

Donne di Mafia / Mafia Women

Mini film festival.

16-17 March 2024.

The Mini Film Festival Donne di mafia, having a voice, returns for its fourth year at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London on 16 - 17 March 2024.

The Festival focuses on the role, presence, and agency of women in Italian mafias, which was part of a research project funded by a Leverhulme Major Fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust https://shorturl.at/rvEIZ

Women in Italian mafias are often portrayed as helpless victims, ignorant by-standers, or passive protagonists. However, new research in the field emphasises their more complex existence within the criminal underworld, showing how ‘women are an integral part of these [crime] groups with their own agency and their own criminal knowledge and capacity for violence’. Mafias, like other organised crime groups, need women to survive and flourish. Behind the mafia male brand, women are crucial as partners-in-crime and without them, it is unclear if mafias would survive. As one former mafia woman once explained ‘there are many women […], there are many types of women […], there are women who want to play the part of men’ (Allum, 2016). Organised crime and Italian mafias are more female than we want to think or accept: è femmina.  

Organised by CinemaItaliaUK https://www.cinemaitaliauk.co.uk/ and sponsored by the University of Bath, Donne di mafia will take place at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith London https://riversidestudios.co.uk/ on 16 - 17 March 2024. This year the festival will also take place in Bath on 23 - 24 April 2024 at the Royal Bath Literary and Scientific institution https://www.brlsi.org/.

London

Saturday March 16, 2024: 4pm-9pm

Sunday March 17, 2024: 4pm-9pm

The festival programme will include four feature films, addressing the question of women in different contexts: 1950s Naples and Campania, 2020s Foggiano, 2010s Calabria - Milano and contemporary Naples. All screenings will be accompanied by experts’ panels to introduce and discuss the films. Among the speakers there will be film director Francesco Munzi, journalists Clare Longrigg and Giorgia Scaturro, academics Gaetana Marrone, Isabella Clough Marinaro, and Veronica Vergna. 

PROGRAM

Saturday 16 March 2024

  •  4pm– 6.10pm: Black Souls (Anime Nere) by Francesco Munzi (110 min)

  • 6.20pm - 7.05pm : Q & A + Panel 1

  • 7.25pm - 9pm: La Sfida (The Challenge) by Francesco Rosi

  • 9.10 - 9.45pm: Q & A + Panel 2

 Sunday 17 March 2024

  • 4pm - 6.15pm: Burning Hearts (Ti mangio il cuore) by Pippo Mezzapesa (120 mins)

  • 6.25pm- 7.10pm: Q & A + Panel 3

  • 7.30pm - 8:56pm: Nevia by Nunzia De Stefano (86 mins)

  • 9pm - 9.30pm: Q&A