Marina Cicogna, the life of the screenwriter and producer in ‘I still hope’

2023-04-29 11:36:17

I deeper memories evoked like scenes from a movie. We proceed by images which, put in sequence, restore the sense of a special life, the life of Marina Stork. In ‘I still hope A story of life and cinema’ (in bookstores from 2 May 2023, Marsilio Specchi) the screenwriter and film producer tells about herself and through the pen of the journalist Sara D’Ascenzo a unique character, who worked with artists of the caliber of Pasolini and Buñuel, who as a free and nonconformist woman has never compromised, creating dreams without ever pursuing them.

Already a Special Award at the Turin Film Festival, in 2023 he will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 68th edition of the David di Donatello. Cosmopolitan, free and open gaze on the world, passionate about photography (“Photography is a constant among my passions, ever since, when I was very young, on the beach of the Lido I liked to immortalize the stars on vacation”), the life of Marina Cicogna, first producer in Europe (“Cinema has always been in my life”) and style icon (“I think it is useless to try to make actors wear clothes that costume designers like more than performers”) is studded with never conventional choices, places, faces and protagonists of extraordinary decades. And in his autobiography he rattles off, through a journey through time, the golden childhood (out of the ordinary) on the Lido of Venice which then arrives at the cold rooms of a Swiss boarding school, from America in the 1980s to the atmospheres of Brazil, from New York from the beginnings to the excesses of the nights in Los Angeles (two cities that “represent the two extremes of my passion for America”), from the beaches of Miami to the return to his beloved Rome.

Between worlds in dissolution and others in transformation, turbulent sets and heavenly abodes, legends and anecdotes intertwine with truths and tragedies, in the relentless story of over eighty years of indissoluble friendships – from Valentino to Jeanne Moreau, from Franco Zeffirelli to Ljuba Rizzoli – professional partnerships that have left their mark – from Giuseppe Patroni Griffi to Gian Maria Volonté, from Ennio Morricone to Elio Petri – the flirtations – from Farley Granger to Alain Delon and Warren Beatty – and more lasting ties, with Florinda Bolkan and with the current Comrade, Benedict.