21/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Mario Martone’s film about writer Goliarda Sapienza breaks free from the classic biopic and makes use of the vibrant performances of Valeria Golino and Matilda De Angelis

Matilda De Angelis, Valeria Golino and Elodie in Fuori

We like the short circuit of Valeria Golino, director of The Art of Joy [+see also:
series review
series profile] – multi-award winning Sky series based on the eponymous novel by Goliarda Sapienza – who plays Sapienza in Mario Martone’s new film Fuori [+see also:
trailer
film profile], the only Italian film in competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. This crossover was born 5 years ago, when Valeria Golino, “imbibed with Goliarda Sapienza for years, with her poetry and her thinking", thought of adapting the posthumous masterpiece of one of the most important voices in Italian literature of the twentieth century. Screenwriter Ippolita Di Majo, who had already adapted for the theatre Sapienza’s second novel, Il filo di mezzogiorno, has drawn on L’università di Rebibbia and Le certezze del dubbio for this script co-written with her husband Mario Martone, which follows, over a summer in Rome in 1980, the friendship between three women, Goliarda and Roberta, and another friend, Barbara.

Born in Catania in 1924 from fervent anti-fascists Maria Giudice and Giuseppe Sapienza, Goliarda’s childhood is marked by the death of four brothers and her mother’s mental instability. At 20, she moves to Rome, studies at the Dramatic Arts Academy but ends up creating her own avant garde theatre company. In her busy life, she frequents exclusive circles and works with directors such as Citto Maselli, Luigi Comencini and Luchino Visconti. She attempts suicide twice and receives a series of electroshocks. She starts writing late and will only get recognition from the general public after the posthumous publication of L’arte della gioia. In 1980, she is denounced by a friend for having stolen some jewellery. She spends five days in the Rebibbia jail and will later tell the story of her hours spent in this contradictory and colourful universe of crude reality in L’università di Rebibbia.

This is where Fuori begins. Goliarda is 55, she lives in a luxury apartment in Northern Rome that she can no longer afford, the book on which she has been working for 10 years has been rejected for the umpteenth time, and she desperately needs money. She still gets invited to the good salons of the capital and it is in one of those that she takes jewellery, with her husband Angelo (Corrado Fortuna) as accomplice, an actor almost absent from her life. In the women's section of Rebibbia, she meets a political prisoner named Roberta, played with passion and talent by Matilda De Angelis: a young proletarian woman, intelligent and energetic, a communist revolutionary hooked on heroin. Goliarda establishes a deep and rewarding connection with her, which helps her beat her pain of living and relights her need to write. Also worth noting is the performance by Elodie, an eclectic artist who offers fresh authenticity to Barbara, the third element in the friendship triangle born in prison and developing once they are free. “They are still inside when they are outside” is Goliarda’s striking synthesis to describe the psychology of these young women fighting for their dreams.

Martone's acknowledged directorial mastery is here enriched by an additional dynamism, with the camera of DoP Paolo Carnera moving in the torrid summertime Rome of 45 years ago, skilfully recreated by art director Carmine Guarino and costume designer Loredana Buscemi. Fuori carefully breaks free from the classic biopic. Whoever watches the film without knowing Goliarda Sapienza won’t get a timely portrait of her, but rather vivid fragments that reconstruct – also thanks to the vibrant and empathetic performance by Valeria Golino – the figure of a “story thief” (as she describes herself in the film), a “cursed” author, a woman with a radically authentic approach to life and art, always ready to prove herself with instinctual passion. Like her masterpiece, rejected by editors for being too traditional, or not enough, or too immoral, or too experimental.

Fuori is a co-production between Italy and France by Indigo Film with Rai Cinema, The Apartment, SRAB Films and Le Pacte Production. Goodfellas is handling international sales. The film will be released in Italian cinemas on 22 May via 01 Distribution.

(Translated from Italian)