In 2009, Stephania Albertani, a 28-year-old woman hailing from the Italian lakeside town of Como, admitted to killing her older sister, burning her body to hide the crime, and then trying to also murder her parents.
Interest in the crime was heightened by Albertani’s assertion that she had no recollection of her actions, and the fact that later on, her 30-year sentence was reduced following neuro-scientific tests which found she had brain abnormalities that made her prone to violent behavior.
Italian director Leonardo Di Costanzo takes loose inspiration from the case for his fourth solo fiction feature Elisa, which world premieres in Competition in Venice today.
The director was previously in Venice with The Interval, which premiered in Orizzonti, and prison drama The Inner Cage, which played out of competition in 2021.
His new film, he says, is not a true crime reenactment but rather expands on an exploration of the theme of guilt begun in The Inner Cage, which revolved around the relationships between a handful of prisoners and guards left in an old prison on the verge of being decommissioned.
“The idea of guilt has always interested me, how it’s attributed, what it means for the person who is found guilty, and how guilt is lived by society and those who are around the guilty party… with The Inner Cage, I wanted to go inside the cell, I felt a need to film the relationship with guilt of those carrying guilt,” he says.
“My documentaries have also always tackled the relationship between mainstream society and people living on the margins,” he continues, citing early works such as La Scuola, about a school on the outskirts of Naples, and Prove di Stato, about a former high school principal who took on the role of mayor in a town controlled by the Camorra in the late 1990s.
“I chose these subjects as a way of looking at what it means to be in and outside of society, and the stories society tells itself to deal with problems on the margins.”
Barbara Ronchi stars as the titular Elisa – an enigmatic figure serving a long-term sentence for the murder of her sister, a crime she cannot remember committing – opposite Roschdy Zem as a French criminologist trying to unlock what happened.
When Elisa agrees to attend sessions with the criminologist to probe deeper into what happened, the clouds start to part.
The screenplay is constructed from transcripts of interviews conducted by criminologists Ceretti Adolfo and Natali Lorenzo with Albertani over the course of a year beginning in 2018, and their subsequent 2022 book ‘Io volevo ucciderla – Per una criminologia’.
“There’s a beautiful dramaturgy in these 12 interviews because bit by bit you see how she transforms, it’s imperceptible at first,” says Di Costanzo.
“She starts off saying she doesn’t remember anything, but then slowly, slowly with the small steps that the criminologists make her take, we arrive at the moment where she admits to knowing she wanted to kill her sister.”
Di Costanzo said he had no desire to meet Albertani as he preparation for the film.
“I didn’t want to be conditioned. I come from documentary, and if I went into fiction it was precisely because I didn’t want to have obligations towards my subjects,” he explains.
He ended up meeting her nonetheless in an unplanned way after being quasi ambushed when he went to the Milan prison, where Albertani was serving her sentence, to meet its director as part of his preparation for the film.
“While I was waiting to be seen, the director came out and told me she was inside with the two criminologists, the woman in question, Signora Albertani, and her lawyer. She said the Signora Albertini wanted to meet me,” recounts Di Costanzo.
“I said yes, but that I really wasn’t prepared. I went inside because at a certain point she didn’t want the film to be made. The production had secured the rights to the book, so from a legal standpoint we were covered, but I felt a moral obligation towards this person,” he continues.
“I said I would allow her to read the screenplay and would explain the choices I’d made but that I had to feel completely free, otherwise it wouldn’t work.”
The film is in Italian and French with Ronchi learning French for the scenes when she is being interviewed by Zem’s character. Di Costanzo says the mix of languages was a deliberate ploy.
“We could have done it all in Italian but my big fear on this film was that we end up with something that was more a true crime film, and what I wanted to tell was something different.”
Adding the French element, he suggests, distanced the story from the Italian case which inspired it.
Venice regular Ronchi was at the festival last year in Golden Lion contender Diva Futura with other recent credits including Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara and Settembre, for which she was a best actress Donatello.
Di Costanzo hit upon the idea of signing Cannes Best Actor winner Zem (Days Of Glory) after seeing him in Arnaud Desplechin’s northern France-set detective tale Oh Mercy!.
“He’s plays this kind human and emphatic police commissioner,” says Di Costenzo.
“He almost agreed right away. We met in Paris and he revealed that he was fascinated by the question of what happens in the mind of someone who is considered normal and then commits an abnormal act.”
The film is produced by Carlo Cresto-Dina and Manuela Melissano at Tempesta and Rai Cinema, in co-production with Michela Pini and Amel Soudani for Amka Films Productions.
Rai Cinema International Distribution is handling world sales while 01 Distribution will release the film in Italy on September 5.
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