After 40 years of abuse, Fiorella finally leaves her husband for good. Now the mother of three grown children, she wearily departs her beloved Italian countryside house and the only identity she's known since she was a teenager. As her filmmaker daughter begins a video diary of her mother's experience, one wonders what took the broken woman so long. But what begins as a chronicle of a midlife bid for freedom widens into a startling image of a culture that's doing its best to push her back home. Her elder daughter concedes that "she is free to do as she pleases, but she'll have to live with it," while an uncle quotes Mussolini: "It is better to marry a lion than a sheep." Intimate confessions and subtle observations reveal an insidious machismo that trumps Fiorella's right to live as she chooses. Quietly enraging, Una Primavera is an eye-opening look at women's place in modern Italy. Myrocia Watamaniuk
Made In Italy program presented in partnership with the Italian Trade Commission and Istituto Luce-Cinecittà.