CANNES - A story of pain, female solidarity and redemption, of anarchy and rebellion, unexpected bonds, fall and rebirth. Mario Martone’s Fuori, starring Valeria Golino, Matilda De Angelis and Elodie, brings the figure of Goliarda Sapienza to the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, in competition. One of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Italian literature, Sapienza was rediscovered only after her death when The Art of Joy, the masterpiece to which she had dedicated ten years of her life, was published first in Germany and then in France. The biopic is inspired by her autobiographical work, L’università di Rebibbia (1983), and retraces the period that the author spent in prison in 1980. Sentenced for the theft of a friend’s jewels, Sapienza transformed the experience into an opportunity for profound human and literary reflection.
Fuori (see all locations here) is an Italian-French co-production, produced by Indigo Film with Rai Cinema and The Apartment for Italy and SRAB Films for France, in collaboration with Fremantle. The photography is entrusted to Paolo Carnera, the editing is by Jacopo Quadri, the set design is by Carmine Guarino and the costumes are the work of Loredana Buscemi.
The film was distributed in Italy by 01 Distribution on May 22.
A mad impulsive gesture sends a writer to prison. There, her encounter with her fellow inmates becomes an experience of rebirth. Released during a torrid Roman summer where time seems suspended, the writer continues to spend time with the women she met who are now friends and who, like her, are now returned to freedom. A profound and lifechanging relationship has been created, an authentic bond incomprehensible to anyone outside the prison system. That writer was Goliarda Sapienza, and this is her story, as she told it.
In 2024, the year which marked the centenary of her birth, which took place in Catania on May 10, 1924, Sapienza was celebrated with a television adaptation of her scandalous posthumous novel The Art of Joy by Valeria Golino (see the locations), presented at Cannes in 2024 and broadcast by Sky (article). In Martone’s biopic, which he wrote with Ippolita Di Majo, Sapienza is played by Golino, who had met her in the 1980s on the set of Citto Maselli's Storia d'amore.
“I met Goliarda when I was eighteen: it was the first real, authentic meeting of my life. She was a lady, she seemed so much older than me, but she had the mind of a girl, with a lively, energetic, strong curiosity. We saw each other two or three times a week for a couple of months. Her ex-husband, Francesco Maselli, invited me to their house. The same house where, forty years later, I would return to play her.”
"During The Art of Joy I had to immerse myself in her poetry, her words, thoughts, in everything she says and contradicts, in that narrative flow that is both rich and disorderly", added Valeria Golino, speaking of her different experiences in directing the series and then acting in the biopic. "Just two months after finishing The Art of Joy, after trying to give shape to her intellectual complexity, I started playing her. Another stage of the journey, different once again: it was no longer a question of immersing myself in her intellectuality, but in her body, her gestures, her way of looking at things and experiencing relationships. A different kind of deep dive to the one I did for The Art of Joy: I had to free myself from some things and hold on to others”.
The spaces full of meaning in Goliarda Sapienza’s life included her home in via Denza, in the Parioli district of Rome. Here the writer lived a complex phase of her existence, marked by economic insecurity and a profound sense of exclusion. Some of the film’s scenes were shot inside that apartment, a place of great symbolism where Valeria Golino had already set foot 40 years earlier:
“We were actually in Goliarda’s house, the same place that I remembered as a girl”, notes Valeria Golino. “Going back there was a deeply touching, almost mystical moment. One of those moments when life seems to have a meaning, when senselessness organizes itself into a design, and you think: “Look, this was just supposed to happen like this”.
The film was shot in the summer of 2024, mainly in Rome, over eight weeks. Locations included Rebibbia prison where Sapienza was actually detained. Located in the north-east quadrant of the city, the prison has a long history of cultural activities, often linked to the world of theatre and cinema. Martone chose to tell the story of humanity on the edge, while also full of dignity and emotional intensity, in these buildings, also using former convicts on the set. Some scenes on the lower floor of the Roman prison were shot elsewhere, the scenes on the upper floor, the entrance and in the courtyard were filmed in Rebibbia.
Fuori opens out to the city: in addition to the prison, it features various neighbourhoods of 1980s Rome, Parioli Porta Maggiore, Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Euclide, Via di Acqua Bulicante, Roma Termini. All the places that form the backdrop to Sapienza’s post-prison daily life, accentuating the contrast between confinement and freedom, between silence and rediscovered words.
“Rome is a city that I have always loved deeply,” said Martone, “so different from Naples: huge, fragmented, each neighbourhood is like its own world. For example, when I arrived in the capital at seventeen, I didn’t know Parioli at all. Goliarda Sapienza lived there, in an apartment that had been assigned to her by a public body. An interesting contrast: an anarchist writer in a bourgeois neighbourhood, with its rational, almost military geometry. This struck me a lot. In the film, where the presence of the prison is also central, the open geometry of Parioli dialogues with the closed, claustrophobic world of the prison. There is a play on spaces and symbols with strongly allegorical meanings.”
The final scene was shot in Rome Termini, complete with real trains, announcements and background noise from the station. “It was very difficult to obtain permits and technical conditions, but for me it was essential to shoot in the real Termini,” admitted Martone. “The places here are not just a backdrop, but are part of the story, like a horizon.”
The sea as freedom: Fregene and Maccarese
Locations also included the Roman coast, in particular Fregene and Maccarese, coastal hamlets of the municipality of Fiumicino. The sequences feature shared moments of escape and complicity for the protagonists, where a ride in a convertible car offers a symbol of vitality and the desire for rebirth, and the landscape becomes a metaphor for a freedom achieved, albeit with difficulty but always possible.
A continuous and ambiguous relationship between reality and imagination underpins the narrative. It is highlighted in the unfolding of a bathroom scene where the space deforms and expands as if influenced by the character’s emotions and memories. The sequence was shot on a soundstage to capture that precise sense of movement of the mind, which experiences the bathroom at a certain point as enormous, and then closes and transforms into a cell.
"It is a scene where through reality you access another reality", notes Martone. Right at a peak of narrative tension, when Goliarda sacrifices herself, locked in a bathroom, the place suddenly transforms into a space of freedom, where reality and imagination continually confront each other. "No-one can save themselves by themselves, it's true, but it's equally true that no-one saves themselves without imagination. It's imagination that brings us back to ourselves when we're trapped in an inner prison or overwhelmed by life that crushes us. That was always there in Goliarda: even in the hardest moments, imagination gave her strength, possibility and breath."