EMILIA AND THE INVISIBLES

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EMILIA AND THE INVISIBLES

EMILIA Y LAS INVISIBLES

By Maria Eugenia LOMBARDI

80 MUNDOS SRL - as PROD

Female director - Pre-Production 2025

Somewhere in Italy. Year 2021. A filmmaker sets out to rescue and restore a film that has been buried for over a hundred years and belongs to Emilia Saleny (1894-1978), the first female film director in Argentina, now forgotten.

Festivals
& Awards

Labex 2020

Developing projects

DAC Lab for projects with gender perspective 2020

Developing projects

DAC Lab for documentary projects 2020

Developing projects

APULIA FILM FORUM 2021

BAFICI (Buenos Aires) 2023

ABC BAFICI

- Year of production
- 2025
- Genres
- Female director, Documentary, Social issues
- Countries
- ARGENTINA
- Languages
- SPANISH-ARGENTINE, ENGLISH-UNITED STATES, ITALIAN, FRENCH
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 70 mn
- Director(s)
- Maria Eugenia LOMBARDI
- Writer(s)
- Maria Eugenia LOMBARDI
- Cast
- Lina MERUANE, Bibiana FULCHIERI, Moira FRADINGER
- Producer(s)
- Emilce MARTIN (80 Mundos SRL)
- Synopsis
- A shovel hits the ground covered with grass and verdigris. The movement is repeated a few times until the ground gives way and allows a hole to be dug. In one of the lunges, the shovel hits something solid. A group of hands finishes removing the soil around the object: it is a thick bag that contains a circular can. Inside the can, there is a nitrate film, dated 1917, which is titled "Clarita's Handkerchief." This film belongs to the first Argentine woman film director, Emilia Saleny. It was underground for more than a hundred years.
  What is known about Emilia Saleny? She was born in 1894. She died in 1978. She married twice. She has no children. In addition to dedicating herself to acting and directing in film and theater, at only 21 years old, she founded the first Academy for Film Technicians and Actors in South America in 1915, a production company (Colon Films) and a distribution company. Despite being incredibly young and bold for the time, her biography data are meager and only one of her films - Clarita's Handkerchief - was preserved. Emilia's work is not studied in film academies and is totally unknown at the popular level. As is known, this could well be said of the historical record of women's lives in general: the list of the invisible is extensive and is repeated in the same way throughout the world.
  Alter the opacity levels. Make the invisible visible. Bringing women from off-camera to the visual field. Replace them in the writing of the stories. A filmmaker sets out to recover the buried film, restore it, and re-release it. However, the one proposed is not an easy task: the can is a loot for which she will have to fight, pushing her ethics to the limit. This rescue operation becomes an obsession to discover what state the nitrate film is in, to return it to the world as a material that carries new meanings.
- Partners & financing
- INCAA (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), 50% of budget in place
- Production schedule
- Development: September 2022-January 2023
  Preproduction: February-March 2023
  Production: March-May 2023
  Postproduction: June- August 2023
  Distribution: September 2023-September 2024
- Beginning of shooting
- Mar 01, 2023
- End of shooting
- May 30, 2023