Maria a piedi nudi

“Maria, 8 years old, lives in Tuscany in symbiosis with nature. She is desperate due to the inevitable eviction by the owners of her playground and the search for a new house in a peri-urban area. I entrust her with a super 8 camera to keep her paradise.”

From the outset, the title of Rebecca Digne’s film establishes its heroine as a fairytale character, akin to those whose name seems to embody their main qualities – here, it appears in the film’s opening shot, as a mix of ingenuousness, vivacity and delicacy. But Maria is also a curious, whimsical and worried young girl: worried about a future that seems to want to tear her away from her childhood home, lost in the Tuscany countryside, which she occupies like a young queen roaming her domain, growing extraordinary plants and flowers, talking to objects as if they had a life of their own, shaking her hair in time with the movements of the horses’ tails, and playing cards with the cat. How could she imagine the loss of her Eden? How could she know what coming of age means? 

The house is to be sold to a wine merchant. Maria predicts that this misfortune will mean that “no one will ever again call it home, no one will ever again enjoy happy memories under its roof”. As intruders wander along nearby paths and her father’s search for another house draws closer, the magic has to continue. Helped by the small Super-8 camera that Rebecca Digne has lent her, Maria turns the house into the film’s recording studio and the camera into the tiny magic box that will safeguard her memories. When she goes to film her new house, it will be with a mobile phone. 

Christian Borghino