VENICE — A mother, a daughter, a secret hidden for twenty years, and a family that, in a desperate attempt to control its own destiny, ultimately spirals downward. In L’estranea, directed by Paolo Strippoli, in Competition at Venice and in cinemas from October 8, a family tries to keep everything under control: parents convinced they can shape their children’s future, a daughter attempting to free herself from the restrictions of a role, and a mother holding on to a secret that could change an entire history. In addition, an external element, foreign yet profoundly familiar, throws everything out of balance.
This tension is at the heart of the film, written by the director with Salvatore De Chirico, a story where family drama intertwines with a broader reflection on the human illusion that life can be controlled. An Italy-France-Belgium co-production, produced by Propaganda Italia with Rai Cinema, in association with Dinamo Film, and with Kazak Productions and Tarantula, the film stars Jasmine Trinca, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Adriano Giannini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. It portrays a family where love, protection, expectations and control gradually become indistinguishable.
The word that may run most deeply throughout the film is “control”. Paolo Strippoli explains that the idea for the film grew out of a personal obsession. “It all started with something that obsesses me: the loss of control.” It is a contradiction that even extends to his profession: “It could be that I became a director because on set I have the illusion that I can decide things, that I can shape reality. The seed for many major mental problems is born when we come up against the impossibility of controlling life, because things happen without asking for permission.” It is this fracture that sets L’estranea in motion: that moment when a family discovers that the future it imagined cannot be controlled, and that the past, however well hidden, will eventually re-emerge to demand its due.
L’estranea was filmed largely in Bari, Monopoli and Gioia del Colle. The setting is an essential component of the story and provides the backdrop for the trajectory of a family that is part of the business community of Bari transforming the city and its social fabric.
The film is set in Bari and Puglia in 1999, a reality Strippoli knows first-hand, having grown up then. At the time, Bari experienced a period of economic and industrial growth, with a section of the middle class earning a new social status through industry, which it then feared losing. “It’s a particularly interesting social class because it occupies an intermediate position: high enough to have something to lose, but not high enough to have a real safety net. Only the middle class can fall. Those below can rise; those above have a parachute. But them? They are on the edge of the abyss.”
The Colonna family occupy this space of fear. Their attempts to control their children and future do not necessarily stem from superficiality or ambition for its own sake. At least in the parents’ minds, they are spurred by love. They want to guarantee their children a happy life but the moment they try to determine what that life should be, they burden their children with expectations. “It’s an act of love,” Strippoli explains. “An act of love that however becomes a form of imposition: the parents try to map out a path and cannot accept that their children might choose another, and above all they cannot change course when life itself does.”
Strippoli notes that the film is not intended as an attack on the traditional family, but rather as an investigation of the family as a microcosm of broader society. “Within a family unit, the outside world first reaches us through our parents. They are the first filter through which a child comes to know reality.” Strippoli considers this filtering function crucial, and one that accompanies individuals throughout their lives. “Every parent is a narrator; they are the author of their children.” The problem arises when that filter fails, when reality is conveyed through fear, anxiety, the desire for control, or an excessively heavy system of expectations. “Parents can do enormous damage if they don’t filter the world properly.”
This is where L’estranea becomes a film about the transmission of pain: what happens to one generation does not necessarily remain confined to that generation. It passes to the next, changes form, hides itself, and eventually resurfaces.
The structure gradually takes the form of a three-act film, alternating between present and past, with the story told by different members of the family, who take centre stage at different moments. A recurring image is the spiral, shown on screen in various forms, while the characters seem to move continuously within a pattern they cannot escape.
Strippoli explains that he returned to a theme present in his previous work: coping mechanisms. “I’m dependent on coping mechanisms because I experience everything very passionately,” he explains, referring in part to his own experience of emotions and anxiety about the future. In the film, these mechanisms take concrete forms. The stranger-woman smokes, monitors her body and posture, and compulsively eats spirals of liquorice. These apparently everyday gestures are physical manifestations of an inner tension, with the spiral representing the inability to escape oneself.
Jasmine Trinca, who plays the bourgeois mother, sees the film’s emotional core as closely tied to motherhood. “Parents’ actions are acts of love,” she says, but they can become “acts of a misguided love that doesn’t truly consider the other person and seeks only to protect them through control.” Control eliminates the space necessary for vulnerability: “There is no space for the children, especially for my character’s son, to embrace vulnerability.” The tragedy of her character also lies in her inability to recognize that vulnerability — not only in others, but in herself. “She doesn’t have the tools to recognize vulnerability in another person and, even worse, in herself.”
She saw the film as an opportunity to challenge the idea of perfect motherhood. Working with Strippoli, she says, allowed her to “dismantle once again the idea of perfection, rigor and control in motherhood,” making room for the possibility of admitting that one can make mistakes. “Perfect mothers, yesterday as today, can be frightening.”
The character played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is “the Stranger”: someone — or something — that comes from outside while simultaneously belonging deep inside. While opposite to what is familiar, she is also a part of ourselves that is unsettling and resonates with extraordinary force, a figure who appears almost diabolical, allowing the film to tear away all the characters’ masks. Trinca uses a proverb to describe the mechanism: “The devil makes the pots but not the lids.” Something paradoxical seems to happen within the family in the film: “They only make lids,” she says. To keep things from being seen, from being felt, from allowing what lies underneath to come out.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s relationship with the character is even more intimate: “I know her very well,” she says, like an old friend from her life, a presence that “has always been inside” her and has always confronted her with dilemmas, forcing her to make choices again and again. When Strippoli offered her the role, the actress felt she could invite that old friend into the film. That presence, the Stranger, ultimately calls the entire balance of the family into question.
Romana Maggiora Vergano plays Alice Colonna, a daughter who refuses to be simply a daughter. “She’s a daughter who runs away,” she explains. “She runs from her mother, but she also runs from the very definition of being a daughter, from a role that feels too restrictive.” To assert herself and discover who she is, Alice must distance herself from her origins. She leaves Bari, takes refuge in Rome, and tries to sever the more conventional ties with her family. Her journey to emancipation begins with distance.
Costume became fundamental to the actress. The physical construction of the character, the wig, the exposure of the nape of her neck and the different way her body is revealed, her bare feet, all take her into a zone of vulnerability: “I was already working in dangerous territory, one that already made me feel unsafe.” That feeling was also liberating: “It somewhat deconstructed me as a person, and freed me from many of the defences I have as a woman and as a performer,” she admits.
One scene that encapsulates the meaning of the film for Strippoli perhaps beyond all others is that of Italy’s victory at the 2006 World Cup. The starting point is a personal memory. The director recalls being around thirteen years old and at the seaside, Punta Prosciutto, with his parents and other people who wanted to watch the match. Initially, he would have preferred to do something else. In the end, he went along, and the evening became an extraordinarily bright memory for him.
That memory has now become cinematic material: in the film the euphoria surrounding the football match comes at the most dramatic moment in the Colonna family’s story. It is a crucial choice because it allows the director to make two opposing emotions coexist at exactly the same moment: the absolute happiness of a community and the absolute pain of an individual. “For me, the prevailing feeling that had to emerge from this film is tragedy.” Not tragedy understood simply as misfortune, but as an existential paradox. “Life is a tragedy because wonderful things happen while terrible things are happening.” It is possible that the entire world is celebrating while, at that very same moment, someone is falling apart. “Seeing people rejoice while a woman sobs, I think, says something about the horrible and frightening loneliness that life sometimes forces us into.”
The scene becomes much more than a football match. It is a poetic statement: the collision of happiness and horror in the same moment. Collective happiness cannot erase individual pain, and individual pain cannot stop the world. Life happens without asking for permission. In the end, all that remains is the possibility of recognizing ourselves, of truly seeing one another, and of finally stopping the attempt to protect ourselves behind lids and masks. This is the film’s true liberation: escaping the spiral does not happen through control, but by recognizing it and finally having the courage to break it.