A lesser-illuminated chapter in the lives of neorealist Roberto Rossellini and actress Ingrid Bergman. After The Rossellinis (2020), RIGA IFF darlings, Italian directors De Laurentiis, Massara and Brunetti, return to the Rossellini-Bergman dynasty to raise the curtain on events surrounding the influential film couple in the mid-1950s. This year the intimate piece won the “Oscar of Italy” – the David di Donatello award – for Best Documentary.

In the 1950s, the Rossellini-Bergman family faced local scorn, press fascination, financial hardships and shifts within the industry. The director’s marriage to Hollywood actress Bergman was dubbed the greatest post-war tabloid scandal – she was a married Swede admired by Hitchcock, while he was the on-screen voice of the fallout from the Mussolini regime. Their collaboration produced five films that Italian society refused to accept. During a career crisis, the PM of India invited Rossellini to make a documentary about Indian society, while Hollywood wanted Bergman to return to the U.S. Both accepted the calls, yet the path they chose became an odyssey of rebirth – painful, strewn with 100 kilos of spaghetti stuffed in a suitcase, and transformative.

By 1956, Rossellini had already shot his golden canon – Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946) – while the scream scene with actress Anna Magnani remains etched in film history. His fame has faded somewhat, and the “migrant films”, as his and Bergman’s work was dubbed in Italy, were doomed at the box office and with critics alike. The essayistic style chosen by the directing trio De Laurentiis, Massara and Brunetti reveals the marriage of the director and the actress in the first person – their letters voiced by actors Kasia Smutniak and Sergio Castellitto. The focus of the film is on change and its painful nature, particularly as Rossellini, during the making of his four-part TV film India: Matri Bhumi (1959), is infatuated with screenwriter Sonali Senroy Dasgupta, wife of his colleague and director Harisadhan Dasgupta, while Bergman reclaims her own identity.