This semester we will look at two different figures of contemporary Italian film and television who largely revolve around "coming of age" narratives. The first is the world-famous Italian writer who goes under the name “Elena Ferrante.” Her works have successfully been adapted for both film — Troubling Love (Martone, 1995), Days of Abandonment (Faenza, 2005) — and television, with the recent adaptation of My Brilliant Friend for HBO (Costanzo, 2018).

The second figure is the young director Alice Rohrwacher, who has already won numerous awards at Cannes, including the Grand Prix in 2014 for the film The Wonders. We’ll discuss a wide of wide variety of topics that these two figures raise: local culture vs. international and transnational culture, gender and sexuality, the anonymous artist, the representation of girls and young women, what it means when a work written by a woman is adapted by a man, and much more.