A filmmaker's lost Vietnam footage, accidentally rediscovered after 55 years of silence.
Before becoming a film critic, then a maker mainly of sharply engaged documentaries, usually in tandem with her late husband Lino Del Fra, Cécilia Mangini was a photographer. Taking pictures was something she did all her life, alongside whatever else she was working on. In 1965 Mangini and Del Fra went to war-torn Vietnam to make a film they never finished. More than half a century later, she returned to these images, moving and still, some of which she found again by accident.
Direction
Mangini's patient, self-interrogating gaze at her own past.
Editing
Jagged time-jumps between 1965 chaos and 2020 fragility.
Director
Cecilia Mangini
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Mangini was Italy's first female documentary filmmaker, making this her final act of witness from a seven-decade career.
The unfinished 1965 film was abandoned because the footage was deemed 'unusable' — a judgment overturned by time itself.
IT
