 |
Mar 26,2006 - Apr 2,2006 |
The story of an Italian-Canadian tragedy
Sergio Navarretta brings Looking to Angelina to the big screen
By Angela Baldassarre
It was the story of the century that caused an uproar around the globe and Italian-Canadian filmmaker Sergio Navarretta chose this tragic life of an immigrant woman as the subject of his feature directorial debut, Looking for Angelina.
The film tells the true story of Angelina Napolitano (played by Lina Giornofelice) who, in 1911, lived with her husband Pietro (Alvaro D'Antonio) in Sault Ste. Marie with their three children. They were a happy family, until Pietro found himself targeted by anti-immigrant racists, and unable to keep down a job. His temper got the best of him, and in order to protect herself and their children, Angelina killed Pietro in his sleep with an axe. The film details the one-day trial of the 28-year-old woman, presided by bigoted judges and lawyers. Angelina was sentenced to hang, but a worldwide outcry forced Ottawa to commute the sentence to jail time.
"I found out about Angelina's story at an Italian-Canadian writer's conference in Toronto," says Navarretta. "There was a playwright, Frank Canino, out of New York who wrote a play about it so he pitched it to me. And then I brought my partner, Alessandra Piccione, in. We had a meeting and we found the facts of the story so fascinating, almost more intriguing than the play itself. The play took a lot of artistic liberties and kind of went off, which you can do with theatre. But for the film we were drawn to the facts, and the more we dug the more we found that the playwright only scratched the surface."
Navarretta, whose short films have screened at festivals around the world, explains that the screenplay contains wording from the actual transcripts of the trial. "It's so sensational in some ways because it's hard to put into cinematic language," he says about how unfair the trial was. "It's just so over top, so arrogant and brutal."
So what happened to Angelina and her family? "We don't know," admits the director. "There were many people involved in the research, through academics and my own team. We went all over from Ottawa to Kingston just chasing clues and our research takes us to about 1933 where we found that she was in jail in Kingston and the man who helped release her from jail hired her as his housekeeper. She raised his children, which is interesting."
Page 1/...Page 2
|
| Home / Back to Top |
|
|
 |
|
|
</ td>
