Cannes Film Festival 2025: with “Fuori”, Mario Martone probes the mysteries of the writer Goliarda Sapienza in a demanding and humanist film

The Italian director has been selected for the competition for the third time.

Director Mario Martone is in the running for a Palme d'Or with a film that pays homage to the writer Goliarda Sapienza, whose book The Art of Joy was first published in Germany and France (2005, Viviane Hamy) several years after her death.

The Art of Joy is considered a major work of contemporary literature. The book tells the story of Modesta, a young Sicilian woman born in the early 20th century. It took Goliarda Sapienza nearly ten years to write, and she died before its publication.

The manuscript of this transgressive, poetic, and feminist work was rejected by all the major Italian publishers. It was self-published by her husband in 1996, the year Goliarda Sapienza died at the age of 70. But the work truly found its way to its readers ten years later, after its publication in Germany, then in France in 2005 by editor Viviane Hamy.

To portray this Sicilian writer, daughter of two leading figures of the Italian left, director Mario Martone chose to focus on a small slice of her life. One summer in Rome. It's the 1980s, and Goliarda Sapienza (Valeria Golino) finished writing her novel several years ago, but hasn't found a buyer among publishers. She herself says that her book is "unpublishable, too long" .

When she starts running out of money, she starts looking for work to avoid eviction from her two-story apartment in the hills above Rome, its walls and floor covered in books. Waitress, cook, chambermaid... she's willing to do anything to earn a living, but no one will hire her. On a whim, she steals some jewelry from an acquaintance. A moment of madness that lands her in Rebibbia Prison, one of the largest women's prisons in the country. There, she rubs shoulders with common law inmates, prostitutes, and political prisoners.

The story moves between prison, before and after, focusing on the intense relationships that Goliarda Sapienza formed with the inmates during her incarceration and that persist after her release ("Fuori" means "outside" in Italian). "With them, I feel free," she tells her husband. She is particularly attached to Roberta (Matilda De Angelis), a young drug-addicted "delinquent" who is also an activist. Together, they share strange moments, between fights and joy, in an ambiguous relationship of desire, friendship, and filial love.

With this evocation in the form of an aimless stroll, the director paints with small strokes an impressionist picture of the complex personality of this great writer with a singular destiny. An evocation that manages to capture the roots of a work by focusing on a moment in the life of its author. A truth that he scrutinizes in moments of solitude, of unspoken desires, through this very special relationship she established with these "delinquents" she met in prison, who, she says, give her the feeling of being free. "We will always be together," she tells her fellow inmates during a party in the back room of a perfume shop.

The Italian director wins a bold bet by taking such a demanding approach. Where others would have been content with a classic biopic, he captures snippets, snapshots of this great writer, who has long remained in the shadows, which paint a sensitive portrait of this worldly woman who "observes the silence."

After filming his city many times, notably in Nostalgia , his previous feature film , the Neapolitan director pays homage to Rome this time, through the "surprise" meetings that Roberta organizes for her friend. "I write to stun myself, like you with your heroine," she confides to Roberta. The film ends with a video clip in which we see her on a television set, trying to make an assembly of journalists understand her experience in prison. Without much success. This very beautiful film does her justice and tribute.

Genre: Biopic, Drama Director: Mario Martone Starring: Valeria Golino, Matilda De Angelis, Elodie Country: Italy, France Duration: 1h57 Release: December 3, 2025 Distributor: Le Pacte

Synopsis : Rome. 1980s. Goliarda Sapienza has been working for ten years on what will be her masterpiece, "The Art of Joy." But her manuscript is rejected by every publishing house. Desperate, Sapienza commits a theft that costs her her reputation and social standing. Incarcerated in Italy's largest women's prison, she encounters thieves, junkies, prostitutes, and even politicians. After her release, she continues to meet these women and develops a relationship with one of them that will restore her desire to live and write.