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Director's Statement
Ever since my dad gave me a camera when I turned seven, making images has been a strategy to keep hold of the people I loved, saving them from the passing of time. I tried to photograph and film my mother too, but pointing a camera at her has never been easy. I have always felt a reverence, a sort of resistance in the action of photographing her. She just was too much to be contained in a single image—too beautiful, too smart, too funny, too intelligent, too aggressive, too incredible. For as hard as I tried, I just could not effectively capture her soul in a shot. She was a mystery to me.
We always had a strong bond, but I had a feeling that there was so much more behind the part of her that I could see and access. For instance, she never told me that she was a model. I discovered that one day when I found locked in a wardrobe a few big photo portfolios with all her Vogue and Harper's Bazaar covers and editorials from the 1960s. I never told her I had found them, because if she didn’t tell me there was probably a reason. The Benedetta I knew was so different from the girl who was staring at me from the magazine pages – and yet, she was so similar. I couldn’t easily bring together all of the contrasting pieces of my mother’s life, and I started to feel that it was my responsibility to recompose them into a coherent story.
My mum also openly challenged me when it came to why I was taking photos and making films.
Why was I so obsessed with it? Was the camera a way to hide, to avoid confronting my experience fully? Why would I need to rely on a camera to keep track of the things that mattered to me? Why didn’t I keep a memory of them, letting go of what was not worth preserving? As I grew up, the role of images became progressively more dominant in our culture. And while I was starting to work as a photographer and cinematographer, I realised that the questions that my mum had posed in time were becoming more and more relevant.
Making this film became a way to confront my visceral fear of losing forever what is bound to disappear. At the same time it was a way to collect and preserve my mother’s legacy, bringing forward the intellectual ideas and emotional feelings that she had initiated by reflecting on her work as a model. Filming her again turned out to be a real challenge, as it implied exposing my reluctant mum while she was carefully explaining to me that “the lens is the enemy,” and she just wanted to vanish, escaping the gaze and leaving behind the world as she knows it. The journey was hard, and it implied quite a lot of mutual harm –but I hope that she will realise that what I did was hopefully done with the kind of integrity that she has always tried to keep within herself.
As for me, I know that I still haven’t managed to effectively capture her essence in a frame.
Instead, I might have finally learned that this is just impossible. As my mum often repeats, “what truly matters, is always invisible.”