English title: A Breath of Life
Lucy is a ninety-five year-old lady. In her apartment, photos turned yellow by the passing time tell the adolescence of a boy who at the time was called Luciano and who was going to live the most terrible period of his life. Lucy is the oldest transsexual woman in Italy. She is among the few survivors of Dachau's concentration camp.
Lucy's story tells us the story of the 1900s. The events of his turbulent life become a metaphor for a humanity that does not give up and that treasures the most important gift in history, memory, as a unique and irreplaceable starting point.
Q&A with Orsolya Petőcz
Speaker biographies:
Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini
artists, filmmakers
Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini made their debut in 2009 with the feature film Et in terra pax (And Peace on Earth) after both graduated in Film History and Critical Studies in 2005 with a further interest in music. And Peace on Earth had its premiere in 2010 at Venice Film Festival – Venice Days and was selected in more than fifty festivals worldwide, including Tokyo International Film Festival and Moscow International Film Festival. It received a special mention at the Nastri d’Argento award (the Italian National Syndicate of
Film Journalists award) in 2011 and was distributed in Italy to movie theaters by Cinecittà Luce and in Home Video by Cecchi Gori Distribution. Their screenplay Rite of Spring was selected in the ‘New Cinema Network’ contest, part of the Rome International Film Festival as well as film festivals in Berlin and Buenos Aires. It was selected for the Sundance Mediterranean Screenwriters Workshop 2016. In 2017 they directed IL CONTAGIO (Tainted Souls), the first Walter Siti’s book-to-film adaptation. In 2021 their third film premiered at the
Torino Film Festival. C’è un soffio di vita soltanto (A Breath of Life) is the story of Lucy Salani, the oldest Italian transsexual woman among the few survivors of Dachau concentration camp. The film was released in theaters at the beginning of 2022.
Orsolya Katalin Petőcz
University of Cambridge
Orsolya Katalin Petőcz is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. She explores queer testimonies across literature and the visual arts. She focuses primarily on the testimonies of survivors of World War II and ties these in to the context in which these testimonies emerge, including early texts of queer and trans theories. Testimony and exile are returning themes of her work. Petőcz is the organiser of the Queer Cultures Colloquium and has recently organised a Q+A at Cam funded conference titled ‘Moving (across) Boundaries’. Petőcz has published research articles in French Cultural Studies in Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Petőcz is the co-editor, with Naomi Segal, of the volume Dwelling: Cultural Representations of Inhabited Spaces (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, based on the Cultural Literacy Everywhere Symposium 2022).
