Reviving the figure of one of the most important actresses in history, considered by many to be the greatest of all time, director Pietro Marcello directs "Duse," a biopic centered on the final years of the "divine" Eleonora Duse, played by the magnificent Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Presented in competition at the recent Venice Film Festival and expected in theaters nationwide on September 18, the film traces the final phase of the career of an artist who, determined to return to the stage despite her illness, finds a way to express her inner conflict in a historical period that, after the Great War, marks the rise of fascism.

The political context is one of the aspects the director focused on most, going beyond a simple biographical reconstruction and highlighting the artistic and social changes that slowly transformed Italy in those years. From this perspective, Duse's reactionary nature emerges, understood as a driving force of transformation and a symbol of creative freedom. In addition to Tedeschi's touching performance, the cast includes Fanni Wrochna, Noémie Merlant, Fausto Russo Alesi, Edoardo Sorgente, Vincenzo Nemolato, Gaja Masciale, Vincenza Modica, Mimmo Borrelli, Savino Paparella, Vincenzo Pirrotta, Federico Pacifici, Marcello Mazzarella, and Noémie Lvovsky.

Drawing an inevitable parallel between the film and our present, Marcello emphasized at the press conference the issues facing the current generation and the urgency of concrete action: “We are the generation of confusion, of hopelessness. Now is the time for civil disobedience to return to grassroots art; for me, it's a moment of self-criticism. I'm struck by what's happening in the world; I'm following the dockers ready to blockade the port of Genoa. Until now, I'd only read about such a gesture in books. I feel liberated; I embraced Duse with this same spirit.”

In the name of a battle against authoritarianism and oppressive rhetoric, the director identified in Eleonora Duse a genuine sense of revenge, precisely in the years when the diva was going through her most decadent phase and was opposing the moral corruption perpetrated by fascism. In this reading, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Marcello states, seemed the ideal choice: "I've always been fascinated by characters in revolt, as all my films demonstrate. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi was the first choice to capture the spirit of Duse. I'm not fascinated by the biopic genre, and then how can I portray the Divine One? We have a film about her, Cenere, many photos, and various testimonies, but what I wanted to portray was her spirit. I chose to focus on the final phase of her life because those were the years of dissolution. Duse is a 19th-century figure, emerging into the 20th century. It's a transitional phase like the one we're experiencing today, a time of indolence, a time in which nothing is true and everything is permitted."