Maria Montessori by Lea Todorov, dedicated to one of Italy’s best-known scientists, will be distributed in cinemas by Wanted from September 26. The film was presented in national preview at the Pesaro International Film Festival of New Cinema on June 17.
Jasmine Trinca plays the pedagogue from the Marche whose method revolutionized education and the approach to childhood. A feminine, feminist and deeply enlightening story for teachers and others, which develops around Maria Montessori, a woman ahead of her time, fighting for equal rights in a world dominated by paternalism and machismo, at the beginning of the last century.
"What struck me most about Maria Montessori, who I expected to be dressed in black, like a nun, is that, before developing her method, she was a nouvelle femme, as emancipated women were called in those days. A woman capable of renouncing motherhood, in short, very very contemporary, revolutionary".
Shot in Paris, Rome and the Castelli Romani (including Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia) and set in 1900, the film tells the story of the encounter between Lili d'Alengy and Maria Montessori. The former is a famous Parisian courtesan with a shameful secret: a disabled daughter, Tina, who she keeps hidden to protect her career in the salons of high society. Lili takes Tina to Rome to entrust her to a pedagogue with experience of similar cases, Montessori, who also hides a secret: a child born out of wedlock. The two very different women, played by Jasmine Trinca (The Son's Room; Fortunata) and Leïla Bekhti (The Restless; A Man In a Hurry), slowly and unexpectedly find an understanding and help each other to conquer their place in the world of men, one to rethink her life and her family relationships, the other to make history.
Maria Montessori depicts a woman’s struggle for emancipation in her private life and her career, and the creation of a method, which has since become universal, from her experimentation and continuous experience. The film shows the interesting transition of the Montessori method, from use with children with learning difficulties to application with all children, highlighting the importance of an inclusive and personalized approach to teaching, designed to encourage diversity for an education that is accessible to children with every type of ability and from any social background.
"It is a pedagogical method derived from a specialized approach for atypical children developed in France in the 19th century. Having seen the successful results, Maria imagined that the method would be equally successful when applied to "normal" children. She was able to test that out in 1907 in the working-class neighborhood of San Lorenzo in Rome. She used teaching tools that allow children to learn on their own - guided by a teacher - and to feel and experience concepts in a very concrete way. She had a proper medical perspective on education. For my part, I stuck to a historical and directorial description of her method. I am absolutely not a specialist!"