Anna

In the early 1970s, two Italian filmmakers met pregnant, 16-year-old Anna, a junky, on the Piazza Navone in Rome. One of them took her under his wing, partly out of pity, partly due to opportunism – thinking ‘there’s a great film in this’. They film her slow recovery from feral homeless person to human being, initially using a film camera and later on video – which, at the time, was a novelty. Alberto Grifi turned the 11 hours of material shot by the duo into a four-hour film and transferred the video onto 16mm film.
Anna is more than cinema vérité, it is a reflection on the camera’s role in documentary filmmaking whereby the crew also have their say. The long takes create a fascinating portrait of the dynamic between filmmaker and subject, and the work also documents a society very similar to today’s – rife with political and social discontent.
Anna was recently restored by film lab L’Immagine Ritrovata and can now be seen with subtitles outside Italy for the first time.