The life and work of the educator Maria Montessori, who in 1889 was the first woman to enrol in Medicine and who revolutionised school teaching with her pedagogical “method”, exported abroad as well.
Competition >> Win 5x2 cinema tickets
The competition closes on 15/03/2024 at 12.00 pm
(5 winners will be drawn and will each receive 2 free admissions. The tickets will be sent by post. Legal recourse is excluded. No correspondence will be entered into.)
A leading figure of the Italian twentieth century, the well known educator is associated not only with the teaching method that bears her name, but also with the remarkable human example she set in the field of social rights. This does not necessarily make her an icon of a hard, uncompromising feminism, yet in this work she is at times portrayed that way (for instance when she claims that men are inferior to women because all the hard work is explicitly female: giving birth, raising children and so on), which diminishes her intellectual and moral stature in order to reinforce the aura of a positive heroine, victim of malice and slander.
The film is a narrative biography with elements of fiction directed by Léa Todorov, with Leila Bekhti in the cast alongside Trinca: the director builds on the meeting between Maria Montessori and Lili d'Alengy, a prominent Parisian woman with a secret considered shameful: a disabled daughter, Tina, whom she keeps hidden at home to protect her career and her social standing.
1900. Lili d'Alengy, a high class Parisian courtesan, flees the French capital to hide her daughter, who has cognitive difficulties. Once in Rome, her life is turned upside down by the encounter with a doctor who has developed a learning method for children with difficulties: Maria Montessori. Yet it is Montessori herself, who publicly embodies and defends a new, modern and emancipated role for women, who will have to pay the price of her battles: a motherhood outside marriage, kept hidden so as not to cause a scandal.
MARIA MONTESSORI by Léa Todorov
In Switzerland the film is released in the following cities:
BADEN: Sterk
BASEL: Atelier – Kult Kino
BERN: Movie
BIEL: Lido
BRUGG: Odeon
CHUR: Studio
DÜBENDORF: Orion
EINSIEDELN: Cineboxx
FRIENSTEIN: Neues Kino
LUCERNE: Bourbaki
SCHAFFHAUSEN: Scala
SOLOTHURN: Kino im Uferbau
ST. GALLEN: Kinok
USTER: Qtopia
UZWIL: City
WINTERTHUR: Loge
ZURICH: Arthouse Movie; Frame
