A teenage girl stands on the brink of a rough, golden stone cliff face, shakily staring down to the blue-green depths far beneath her.[1]
Author: Maria Elena Alampi
By Danielle Hipkins
Recent controversy over abortion rights has led me to reflect how – if at all – abortion features in contemporary media storytelling. In the context of our project on girlhood in Italian cinema and television, teen audiences infrequently encounter stories that include abortion.
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Wonder When You’ll Miss Me
Film Review by Francesca Di Fonte
ITET Tomasi di Lampedusa, Sant’Agata Militello (ME)
This film Wonder When You’ll Miss Me (Mi chiedo quando ti mancherò, Francesco Fei, 2019) based on Amanda Davis’ book by the same name, tells the story of a young girl, Amanda, who creates a sort of imaginary, protective friend in order to survive a tough adolescence, a friend who will help her to make the ‘right’ decisions.
In early May this year, at the age of 17, Swamy Rotolo from Gioia Tauro in Calabria became the youngest to win the prestigious Italian film prize, the David di Donatello, as Best Leading Actress for her role in Jonas Carpignano’s A Chiara (2021).
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Euphoria: It seemed like beauty
The second season of Euphoria is over. There’s no denying that this is unwelcome news, either because certain issues haven’t been resolved, or just because we know we will have to wait a good while before we can once again see those characters we’ve actually learnt to love, even though they might be fundamentally hateful and problematic.
Written by Flavia Franguelli
Written by Isabella Aguilar and released in September 2021, the Italian Netflix show Luna Park has at its core the story of Nora and Rosa, two long-lost sisters who finally meet again and start to find out the truth about their past. Televisions and colourful scooters, as well as posters of La dolce vita and reproductions of Italian quiz shows like Il musichiere suggest the series’ setting, i.e. Italy in the 1960s.
(University of Exeter, Sapienza Università di Roma, IIS Marisa Bellisario)
By Danielle Hipkins (Translation and editing by Flavia Franguelli)
The video of the round table is available at this link : https://vimeo.com/688868315
One of the key aims of this project is to find ways to listen to and promote Italian girls’ views on the role that Italian cinema and television play, or could play in their lives.
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An A-Z of Girlhood on Screen
(Developed by Fiona Handyside, Danielle Hipkins and Peyker Özler)
Affect (Girl as)
Monica Swindle, in ‘Feeling Girl, Girling Feeling: An Examination of “Girl” as Affect’, Rhizomes 22 http://www.rhizomes.net/issue22/swindle.html, examines ‘how age and gender affect feeling and emotion (girling feeling) and how girl, as an affective state, can affect and be used to affect, how it affects girls and women and how it might be used to affect others to push back against forces that constrain girls and women (feeling girl).’ When thinking about affect, we can think about how the feelings and emotions generated within and by the representations of girlhood (and how they manifest in the combination of narrative, sound and image) might encourage us to invest in certain ideas, or ideologies.
