Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence

Italy’s first woman film director was Elvira Notari, a prolific pioneer of Neapolitan cinema whose emphasis on urban life and use of non-professional actors prefigured the neorealist movement of the 1940s and 50s. Successful in her time but largely forgotten today, Notari slipped into obscurity partially due to the state of her filmography: of the sixty feature films and over one hundred shorts that she directed, only three are known to exist in a complete state today. Elvira Notari: Beyond Silence is a portrait of a major artist and the people working to protect and expand her legacy.