Flip through the imaginary Yellow Pages of Italian cinema and you’ll see the usual names—Rossellini, Antonioni, Fellini, Bertolucci—all male, all still dominant in today’s international film discourse. For better or worse, Italian cinema is often shorthand for these masters, the men who taught the world to see Italy, whether neorealist streets or Roman decadence. But their films tell only half the story.
The other half has lived mostly in the margins of those pages, sometimes erased entirely. I should say upfront: this isn’t academic expertise speaking, but pattern recognition born from (too) many hours spent in film festival theaters. Somewhere between my third Alice Rohrwacher and my first Maura Delpero, I noticed a connecting thread: their films felt different from the cinema I’d been taught to recognize as “Italian”. This led me down a rabbit hole. Who else was filming, writing, acting in pieces like these? Creating stories slightly outside the male-dominated canon, but that felt entirely regional, intimate, and attentive to women’s interior lives?
The first of her kind was Salerno-born Elvira Notari (b. 1875). She made over 60 films between 1906 and 1930—more than any of her male contemporaries. She also ran her own production company, worked with mostly non-professional actors, and distributed her films to Italian immigrant communities in New York City. And yet, today, only three of her films survive.
The lineage continues: Lina Wertmüller, the first woman nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards with Seven Beauties (1977); Francesca Archibugi, whose debut Mignon è partita (1988) won five David di Donatello awards; Cristina Comencini, director, screenwriter, and novelist, whose Don’t Tell (2005) earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. If Italian cinema has founding fathers, these are its founding mothers.
Below, five contemporary female directors who are carrying this legacy forward.
Alice Rohrwacher (b. 1981)
Alice Rohrwacher is a personal (and global) favorite and one of the first that sparked my curiosity of the current Italian film scene. Born in Fiesole and raised in a bilingual household in the countryside, Rohrwacher studied literature and philosophy at the University of Turin and screenwriting at the Holden School in Turin. She draws from both worlds to build her distinct cinematic language: human-forward, introspective stories grounded in rural Italy, often with a subtle touch of magical realism.
In Le meraviglie (The Wonders, 2014), a family of beekeepers strives to make a living in a world where their craft slowly becomes obsolete; in Happy as Lazzaro (2018), the saintly Lazzaro faces capitalist exploitation and the pressures of modernization; in La Chimera (2023), grave-robbing becomes a bridge to the past.
Rohrwacher’s work is rooted in tangible elements—earth, labor, community—yet it drifts into myth and transcendence. In La Chimera, Arthur’s connection to the earth is both literal and spiritual: each artifact he exhumes links him to the underworld and to the woman he has lost.
What makes her films enduring is their universality. She never confines vulnerability to female characters or imposes gendered stereotypes. Men, women, and children alike confront forces larger than themselves: the economy, time, modernity, etc. And yet, her characters cling to these things—beekeeping, folk songs, and rituals for the dead—amidst an ever-changing world.
Maura Delpero (b. 1975)
Where Rohrwacher’s characters navigate open landscapes, Maura Delpero’s protagonists confront similar emotional terrains but behind closed doors. Born in Bolzano, Delpero has been one of Italian cinema’s most exciting voices since her feature debut, Maternal (2019), an Italian-Argentinian film that explores themes of motherhood from three different angles: children, mothers, and the celibate nuns who house them.
Before directing her own films, she worked as a documentary filmmaker, a training that’s evident in her process. For Maternal, she spent time researching hogars, Argentinian shelters run by nuns for single mothers, where the movie takes place; and for Vermiglio (2024), she drew on family memories to develop the narrative, as her father grew up near the Alpine village where it takes place. In a 2024 interview with Elissa Suh for Screen Slate, Delpero said, “While writing the script, I discovered that I had a lot of sensory material to grab from. The worlds you get to know when you’re a child are very strong because of how you absorb them. You don’t have any defense; they arrive directly into your belly. When I began to write, I felt that I had all that world in its sensoriality inside me. It was just a matter of structuring it—an entire world of smells, taste, language, sounds.”
What stands out in the body of her work is how duty and responsibility usually clash with desire and sexuality. In Maternal, the nuns who run the hogar in Buenos Aires care for the children—and, in many ways, the single mothers too—fulfilling their desire to nurture even though they cannot have children of their own. In Vermiglio, a snowbound Alpine village becomes the sole witness of intimacy and love at the end of WWII, as the Graziadei sisters navigate desire, societal expectations, and asserting their agency amid the constraints of war and tradition. The film earned Delpero the Grand Jury Prize at the 81st Venice Film Festival and became Italy’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards—the first Italian film by a woman submitted in nearly 20 years.
Throughout her works, Delpero reveals how spaces of devotion and purity can constrain female desire and longing, juxtaposing repression and duty with intimacy, sisterhood, and the full, often complicated, spectrum of human relationships.
Paola Cortellesi (b. 1973)
Roman-born Paola Cortellesi is widely known for her acclaimed acting career, spanning around 20 films over three decades. In 2023, at age 51, she took her first leap into directing with the film C’è ancora domani (There’s Still Tomorrow)—which she also co-wrote—one of the most powerful debuts in recent Italian filmography and among Italy’s Top 10 highest-grossing films ever.
Shot in black and white, the film is set in post-war Rome and follows Delia—also played by Paola Cortellesi, a feat that doesn’t go unrecognized—a working-class wife and mother who is forced to endure constant physical and verbal abuse of her husband, matched by a lack of respect outside her household. Dominated by this narrative of domestic violence, poverty, and women’s rights in post-WWII Rome, it’s a tough film to watch, but a major breakthrough in the conversations around such topics. Even Cortellesi was surprised by the overwhelming response to the film, which can largely be credited to the balance she strikes between social critique and accessibility.
Cortellesi, who had previously been known for her comedic roles, said she was inspired to take the role, and directorial debut, to raise awareness of issues that have persisted in Italian patriarchal society since her grandmothers’ time. “I understood that every Italian, young or elderly, recognized in the film a little piece of their own family,” she said, according to a 2024 The Guardian article written during her press tour. “Not necessarily violence, but certain attitudes towards girls and women.”
By boldly stepping into “mainstream cinema”, Cortellesi proved that the female gaze could draw both audiences and also box-office numbers, while still exposing the everyday cycles of violence shaping women’s lives in Italy. Her film ends on an empowering, somewhat upbeat note, a hopeful mirror for the female experience in Italy and beyond.
Alina Marazzi (b. 1964)
Watching one of Alina Marazzi’s films feels like reading someone’s diary, or finding an old letter sent between lovers. As a director, the Milan-born Marazzi has carved a space somewhere between documentary and fiction, with films that question how women’s lives are (or are not) recorded. To tell these stories, she often uses archival footage, home movies, and other material to reconstruct the female experience and the lives of women that are often easily forgotten.
Her first documentary, Un’ora sola ti vorrei (I Want You For Just One Hour, 2002), focuses on her mother, telling the story of her short life until her suicide at the age of 33. Marazzi uses archival Super 8 footage she found in her maternal grandfather’s camera, letters her mother wrote during her time in a psychiatric hospital, and medical records from the hospital, complete with her own voiceover. This beautiful, heart-wrenching attempt to reconcile her own grief as she attempts to get to know her own mother earned Marazzi the prize for best documentary at the Turin Film Festival.
In Vogliamo anche le rose (We Also Want Roses, 2007), Marazzi analyzes the Italian feminist movement of the ’70s through the diaries and intimate experiences of three women who grew up in different social and cultural environments. Using visual and auditory snippets from these women plus vintage footage from that era, she explores themes of divorce, abortion, activism, and the subsequent sexual revolution, shining a light on how the model of a woman has changed in the past decades.
What unites these works is Marazzi’s insistence that the personal is political, and that women’s experiences, whether her mother’s or an activist’s, are worthy of cinematic history.
Susanna Nicchiarelli (b. 1975)
Susanna Nicchiarelli’s films are, in many ways, acts of canon correction. With a PhD in film aesthetics and a degree in film direction, she brings both academic insight and personal curiosity to her work, which spans directing, screenwriting, and acting across around 15 movies and tv shows.
Many of these are female biopics about women that Rome-born Nicchiarelli finds compelling. In an interview with The Italian Rêve, she said, “Having people’s real life as a source is much more interesting, because it forces you to somehow disintegrate the story, instead of making everything logical…if you take people’s real life, you can take pieces, photographs. It is a kind of mosaic that is more interesting to manage from a cinematographic point of view.”
In Nico, 1988 (2017), Nicchiarelli explores the life of the German model and Velvet Underground singer Christa Päffgen, whose stage name was Nico. All too often, Nico was defined by the male geniuses who surrounded her (even Wikipedia lists Nico first as “former muse of Andy Warhol”); but Nicchiarelli centers Nico within her own story, showing a woman struggling with addiction, motherhood, and fame. The movie won the Orizzonti Award for Best Film at the 74th Venice International Film Festival and the 2018 David di Donatello Award for Best Original Screenplay.
In Miss Marx (2020), Nicchiarelli turns her focus to Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl, blending historical fiction with an intimate character study. The director portrays Eleanor both as a powerful feminist advocating against patriarchal oppression and also as a woman undone by an abusive relationship—an internal tug that resonated on some level with many viewers. The film received several accolades at the 77th Venice International Film Festival.
A crucial part of Nichiarelli’s work is that, through all of these film portraits, she doesn’t try to sanctify her subjects. The characters she chooses to study are contradictory, often self-destructive, always fully, messily human. This thread continues in her latest film, Chiara (2022), as she writes St. Claire of Assisi as a figure of deep faith who’s nevertheless struck by her own vulnerability. By treating Nico, Eleanor, and Chiara with the same seriousness long reserved for male figures, Nicchiarelli, like her contemporaries, shifts the coordinates of Italian cinema.
