Ardenza
Daniela de Felice
Documentary | France | 2022 | 1h07
An account of sensual liberation and political commitment, during the 90s, in Italy. A young woman moves, she stumbles, she experiences pain and pleasure. Her story is strewn with encounters, ephemeral and exhilarating moments. She tells her incandescent path through desire and bodies. The film unfolds the sensual energy of a moment of life that still resists and resounds. In the background, Italy is preparing to bring Forza Italia to power and the clashes between the left and the far right are becoming more and more violent.
"As her body surrenders, a young Italian woman navigates in the comforting ardor (ardenza) of her memories. Faced with the immobility of the present, she invokes the exaltation of her adolescence in Italy in the 1990s. For Daniela de Felice, the beauty of her youth lies in a heroic candor that leads her to consider that risk is the only possible territory for existence. As Silvio Berlusconi's conservative Forza Italia is about to take power, the concomitant awakening of desire and political awareness ignites a fire in a youth whose anarchistic breath awakens a country that was asleep. In Ardenza, memory is composed of both a sensory reminiscence, suggested by a delicate and evanescent sound work, and retrospection, verbalized with voice-over, advocating a nostalgia of political commitment (and its utopian fervor). The incandescence of the memory, conveyed by the watercolors, resonates with the harshness of the pen which draws its contours. The ink immortalizes the revolutionary desire of a woman purely faithful to her own sensuality."
Robin Miranda das Neves – Préselectionneur
Daniela de Felice was born in Milan in 1976. She grew up in Italy where she studied drawing and art history. At the age of 17 she went to Brussels to study Visual Narrative at the ERG. There, she made her first film which was noticed in many festivals. She returned to Italy and started to work at Fabrica Cinema. Alongside her work as a director, Daniela de Felice is also an editor.
