27/03/2025 - We met with the director to talk about abandoned children, female emancipation and the search for one’s roots, themes which are central to his documentary about the former Bari orphanage

In his new documentary, Cradle Siblings [+see also:
interview: Alessandro Piva
film profile], Alessandro Piva tells the different stories of those who were formerly the little residents of a Bari orphanage, which, from the postwar period onwards, took in thousands of children who’d been abandoned at birth. Following its debut in the Italian film competition of the 16th Bif&st - Bari International Film&Tv Festival, the title will begin a tour of cinemas in various Italian cities, distributed by Seminal Film.

Cineuropa: Your family home in Bari was just a few metres away from the orphanage, an institution which, for decades, took in children who had been abandoned at birth. What made you want to talk about it today?
Alessandro Piva: When I was a little boy, I was incredibly curious about that enormous place. Then, at the end of the ‘90s, it was closed, and I watched it deteriorate over the years. One day, I discovered that social media was full of appeals from people who spent time in that establishment. People who, in many cases, only discovered that they were adopted once they were adults and who felt an overwhelming need to go back to their roots, despite having solid adoptive families. Over and above wanting to see themselves in the face and physiology of their natural mothers, they needed to understand whether or not they were born out of love. An essential need for the truth, which clashes with the gauntlet of bureaucratic hindrances you’re faced with these days, in the name of the right to anonymity which many of these natural mothers signed up to when they handed over their kids to these children’s homes. But the fundamental thing which drove me to make the film is the fact that, in Italy, a significant number of people were raised in these residential institutions. We’re talking about a million people over a fifty-year period, from the second postwar period onwards. A phenomenon of this significance, involving these kinds of numbers, can’t just be relegated to a handful of news articles or sporadic opportunities for in-depth investigation.

This theme inevitably overlaps with the evolution in the female condition in the ‘70s.
Running parallel to the main story, which is about the orphanage, there’s the story of the change in women’s perception of themselves from the Italian postwar period onwards; from a condition which was totally subordinate in terms of work and family, psychologically and personally speaking, to one which saw them demanding their rights, which was a crucial time of growth for our country. There was a kind of motto which emerged in the materials we examined: “people talk”. Because of what was seen to be scandalous at the time - in other words having a baby outside of marriage - millions of women had to abandon their children. The government has had to take stock of the scale of this phenomenon and invest enormous amounts of resources into organising homes for abandoned children. It’s a consequence of our culture - a Catholic and Christian-Democrat culture - which, from a political viewpoint, probably helped the country pick itself up more quickly from the disasters of war. But it’s also true that it’s hampered our social conscience and meant that phenomena such as the abandonment of children proliferated to an abnormal extent compared to the rest of non-Catholic Europe.

So it’s thanks to female movements that institutions of this kind started to close?
The law on abortion definitely reduced the number of children abandoned, so much so that establishments like these closed at the end of the ‘90s not so much because of a new ethical awareness but because they weren’t of use anymore. Bari’s orphanage was closed in ’98: they went from having almost 300 residents in the Seventies to five.

Was it hard finding former residents of the orphanage and getting them to talk?
There aren’t any official documents available, but the option to make appeals on social media and the existence of associations on this subject-area, who try to put information online, meant that it wasn’t hard to find people and ask them to agree to an interview. It was harder finding our way through the vast sea of people we came across, choosing the right individuals who wouldn’t treat the documentary like a kind of Chi l'ha visto missing persons programme where we’d be making appeals to the public. We had to strike the right balance between the need for truth, their desire to talk about themselves, potentially on an intimate level, and respect for their relationships with their adoptive families.

(Translated from Italian)