Giovanni Piperno, Anna Villari / Italy / 2023 / 60’ / Italian

In 1941 Italy was at war.The Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone’s cosmetic house launched a competition for a new powder, “Velveris”, addressed to their female clientele, who had to tell the story of their lives to the newspaper “L’Illustrazione del Popolo”. The jury proclaims three winners, but then the war ends everything. – – The stories of those women remain: eighty years later, the film based on their lives is finally made. Cipria shows three female lives captured in real time, with a creative use of films from the Luce Archive, together with the repertoires of Home Movies. An unexpected story emerges, where 80 years old sensibilities are connected with the desire for emancipation and vindication of their protagonists. 

Screenplay Giovanni Piperno, Anna Villari
Editing Patrizia Penzo
Music Tapani Rinne
Sound design and mix Marco “Osso” Furlani, Roberto Cappannelli, Stefano Civitenga
Production Luce Cinecittà, Home Movies
Animation Stanislao Cantono di Ceva

Giovanni Piperno

He has directed numerous documentaries including Un thè sul set (co-directed with Laura Muscardin) at the 1995 Venice Film Festival, Intervista a mia madre broadcast on RAI 3, Il film di Mario also broadcast by ARTE (both together with Agostino Ferrente) and L’esplosione winner of the Turin Film Festival 2003 and candidate for the David di Donatello 2004. CIMAP! centoitalianimattiapechino, took part in the 2008 Locarno Film Festival and won the Libero Bizzarri 2009 award. The film about the Agnelli family, Il pezzo mancante, after its participation in the 2010 Turin Film Festival, was released in theaters in 2011 and broadcast on RAI 1. Le cose belle, co-directed with Agostino Ferrente, took part in the 2012 Venice Film Festival, won twenty-five awards and was released in Italian cinemas in 2014. With the collective film 9×10 novanta, he took part in the 2014 Venice Film Festival. Cinema di Roma 2015 presented the short film Quasi Eroi which won the Silver Ribbon as best short film of 2016. Since 2017 he has been director of the Perugia Social Film Festival, and since 2020 he has taught documentary direction at the Gian Maria Volonté School.

Anna Villari

Museologist, art historian, university professor, curator of cultural and exhibition projects, author and consultant of radio and television programs and documentaries (Rai 1, Rai 5, Sky Arte), collaborator of weeklies and magazines. Among the museum projects he has curated, the Garibaldi Memorial in Caprera, the project for the future Comics Museum in Lucca, the project for the Forte Aurelia Museum in Rome, the Federico Fellini Museum in Rimini, under the artistic direction of Studio Azzurro and with Marco Bertozzi, who was chosen among the top ten museums inaugurated in Italy and in the world in 2021. As an author, she has published numerous studies on the relationship between the arts and Italian history of the 19th and 20th centuries, political propaganda through images, the copyright advertising, graphics and billboards. He has collaborated since 2010 with the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, dealing with the conception and curatorship of cultural projects linked to national anniversaries, and is a university professor of Visual Arts and Technologies and Museology in Rome (University Uninettuno).