The Italian film The Macalusco Sisters—a Venice International Film Festival “Official Selection” in 2020 and recipient of Best Film and Best Director awards at the Nastri d’Argento Awards this year—is now slated for worldwide distribution. Writer/director Emma Dante spoke to us at Occhi about the film—a magnificent, often ethereal story of the life journey of the five sisters of the title.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us about The Macalusco Sisters. Please describe the premise of the film for our readers.
The Macaluso Sisters is a love story that starts with five little girls full of life and a future ahead, and then… slowly the elaboration of mourning, the sense of guilt, the disenchantment…but love resists, throughout the film, love is the only glue that keeps the sisters together even after death.
It’s a film about time. Time that passes and creates mutations. I tried to tell the metamorphosis of bodies inside a nest where a family of women and doves live and get old together. The house is the sixth sister with its flayed walls, stains, and cracks on the walls. The corners where memories remain and the halos of the ones we loved.
The actresses who play the Macaluso sisters in the three stages of life—youth, adulthood, and old age—are extraordinary. They managed to give the sisters a soul and an elsewhere. In the Macaluso’s house, life persists even after passing away. Those whom we have loved remain, look at us and whisper in our ears: you are beautiful!
For me, the Macaluso Sisters was a real sentimental journey.
The Macalusco Sisters is based on a play, also created by you. What did you have to give up, and what did you gain, in transforming it for film?
Unlike the play, where the sisters live on a completely empty stage, in the film, there is the house and its eyes. From above there is the look of surveillance of the house, its eyes are in every room, and it is a static look, a fixed look.
The house watches the sisters fight, laugh, play, and get sick and focuses on the buildup. The furniture is small niches full of compartments and drawers, sideboards, and cabinets that serve as family chapels. How many things lie forgotten forever inside the small home loculi!
In the play, all this was not impossible. The film gave the Macaluso sisters a residence, an address. Now I know exactly where they live.
For the cinematographic transposition, I was supported by different visions, those of Giorgio Vasta and Elena Stancanelli, who helped me to get away from the play’s theatrical structure by reviewing the story in light of a completely different form of expression, the cinema. Also, I was quite clear that the film would be something different, and from the beginning, I didn’t fight to stay true to the play. I knew that in order to make a convincing transposition, I had to betray and modify the play. In fact, the film is very different from the play; I would say that they are two totally autonomous works. It was quite a challenge, I never felt I was forcing the issue or a sense of loss, the experience was powerful and necessary.
Part of the beauty of The Macalusco Sisters is that it refuses to saturate the plot. For instance, we never learn how the sisters became orphaned, or even how they feel about it, individually or collectively. The story is pared down to a handful of luminous moments that define the relationships among the sisters. Did you argue with yourself about what to leave out, or was the process intuitive?
It was more of an intuitive process, already in the first phase of writing. With Giorgio Vasta and Elena Stancanelli, we never knew where to place the parents. We wanted a family made up only of sisters. And we didn’t want to reveal the precise plot of their lives in the three stages: childhood, adulthood, and old age.
I never felt in the film the lack of a father or even a mother. I feel that it is a complete family, with a surname and a precise origin, a family that is organized from the inside with women and animals, “the little people” as Anna Maria Ortese defines them in a passage that Maria reads to Lia before she dies.
The plot does not exist because we enter the house in the three extraordinary moments of their lives: the appointments with death.
The house the girls live in is a character in itself. Seeing it full and then seeing it empty is a revelation of sorts for the viewer. Please talk about the house as a character and how you decided how much screen time to give it.
The house of the Macaluso sisters is an existential labyrinth that we tried to describe in great detail even in the writing phase.
The house/dovecote is as much a protagonist as the sisters. Noises, objects, rooms are landscapes to shoot, fragments and segments of life that converse and age along with the sisters from childhood to old age. The rooms are full at the beginning of the film and empty at the end.
Especially at old age, the house shows its flayed walls, with stains and cracks. The dismantling of the house is the funeral of the film, the farewell to the viewers. Lia empties the rooms, destroying and throwing away things she does not want to survive as if she is afraid that they will be desecrated by others. It is her showdown, the moment she gets rid of the weight of remorse. When Lia reopens the hole on the wall that she had made as a child, she sees again the young Macaluso sisters looking through the hole at their wonderful love story.
The death of both Lia and the house represents a new rebirth. At the end of the movie, the rooms are completely empty, like shrunken wombs finally giving birth to the little sisters. Lia, Maria, Pinuccia, Antonella, and Katia get back together and give us their backs, watching the sea.
The doves are so much more than a means for the girls to support themselves. Please talk about the part they play in the story.
Doves always go back to their dovecote of origin because they were born and lived there. Even if someone takes them to the other side of the world, they will always return to the same dovecote. For me, it was important to connect the doves to the place of origin with the history of the sisters and the house where they return over a period of eighty years. Doves are “the little people” (as Ortese defines the animals) who accompany and protect the sisters, like real parents. The doves will always be there. “The little people are pure and good. They are not greedy. They know neither the accumulation nor the waste.” And they’ll always come back to the house even when there’s no one left.
Maria, the sister who dreams of being a dancer one day, dances twice in the film, in the beginning, and later, when she is older, just after the terrifying scene when we see her at her job. What exactly was her job, and why did you choose it for her? And please talk about the differences between the two dances.
Maria has a broken dream: she wanted to become a dancer and instead finds herself cleaning the remains of animals on the tables of a septic room of a zoo prophylactic institute.
The first dance represents hope, typical of childhood. It is a dance that looks to the future where everything is possible. The second, instead, is a dance of farewell, of a woman who has just come to know that she is ill and continues to cling to a dream that makes her feel alive, despite the condemnation.
Your film is opening in theaters in New York very soon. Where can readers find information about where to go to see it?
As you probably know, I live in Italy… BUT I’ve been told that you can check theatres and buy tickets directly online https://my.filmforum.org/events/the-macaluso-sisters
Ed. Note:
Also, in Los Angeles at www.Laemmle.com
In Phoenix at www.harkins.com
In Detroit at www.themapletheater.com
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