Anna
An extraordinary time capsule of urban underclass life in early 1970s Italy, ANNA is an epic documentary about the troubled teenage drug addict that actor Massimo Sarchielli met on the street in 1972, taking her in as a guest in his Rome apartment. Co-directed by Sarchielli and Alberto Grifi, this marathon observational experiment is emotionally raw and politically revealing, with an uneasy authorial tone somewhere between empathy and exploitation. ANNA, the first film in Italy to be shot on an open-reel video camera (and later transferred to grainy monochrome 16mm), recently received a full digital restoration. It remains a raw, challenging milestone in European underground cinema.
Anna, Raoul Calabrò, Pilar Castel
- Notes From Rachel KushnerANNA, about a pregnant teenage girl living on the streets of Rome, is the mother of all films about Italy in the 1970s. Everything is shown, including Anna in the shower with lice shampoo, and yet the film is full of mystery, as if its scenes contain invisible secrets that bear intense scrutiny and never entirely divulge themselves. Every time I watch it, I’m transfixed anew.
