Critic, journalist and film director, Mario Sesti hosts a television program on film and culture at large on Iris (Splendor - Suoni e Visioni). He has directed over ten documentaries selected for festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Locarno and Torino. He has twice won an award for the best book about film (for his Nuovo Cinema Italiano in 1994 and his Tutti i film di Pietro Germi in 1997). In 2005 he won the Diego Fabbri Award for best film-related book of the year (In quel film c'è un segreto). Sesti is a curator of the Rome Film Fest and directed the Taormina Film Fest from 2012 to 2014. He co-wrote the screenplay for the films Appassionate (1999) and Cosa c'entra con l'amore (1997); for the latter he was awarded the Solinas Prize, together with Ivan Cotroneo and Silvia Barbiera.
"The film hunts out and deconstructs the personalities, narratives and production styles of these low-budget but big box office films (that could rake in up to four times what they cost to turn out), but above all outs all the variations on discrimination, sexual stereotypes, and exploitation of the woman's body that appear highly controversial today. All are aspects that this film examines as if under a microscope, one that is ‘involuntarily' revealing. By means of interviews with critics and experts on the genre, as well as female journalists and contemporary scholars, therapists and burlesque performers, I tried to map out and reconstruct the set of images associated with this film genre. Then understand the ways in which it reflects society, rituality, mainstream ideas and behaviors, and starting from that one scene, how, after the worldwide revolution of the #MeToo movement, it exposes the distance between us today and a mentality whose limits, inadequacy and abuse of power we can now see clearly." [Mario Sesti]
