Silent Divas: ASSUNTA SPINA
Co-Commissioner & Producer
“ENTHRALLING. The music brought it to life. The film was an age-old story, but… 100 years old! Amazing to see. It was bloody brilliant.”
Nov 2017 - May 2019
Francesca Bertini was one of Italian cinema’s greatest (and often forgotten) ‘silent divas’ starring in the 1915 silent drama ASSUNTA SPINA. Along with Glasgow Film Festival, I co-commissioned a new live musical score for the film from not-so-silent six-piece southern Italian folk band The Badwills.
The band did some fantastic work with the score and after a premiere in Glasgow Film Theatre, we toured the film to acclaim from audiences from Orkney to Newcastle with support from Film Hub Scotland, PRS Foundation and Film Hub North.
Alongside the feature film there was dancing and films made by forgotten female filmmaking pioneers re-discovered by the brilliant archive activists Invisible Women.
Poster design by Snowball Design