Two Forgotten Boxes

Before becoming a film critic, then a maker mainly of sharply engaged documentaries, usually in tandem with her late husband Lino Del Fra, Cécilia Mangini was a photographer. Taking pictures was something she did all her life, alongside whatever else she was working on. In 1965 Mangini and Del Fra went to war-torn Vietnam to make a film they never finished. More than half a century later, she returned to these images, moving and still, some of which she found again by accident. But Due scatole dimenticate is much more than a return to unfinished business: Mangini takes the opportunity to look back at her life and the choices she made, how the world has changed during her near one hundred years on earth. In all that, of course, are lessons to be found for the future – a morrow without wars and without all suffering other than the body's own... (International Film Festival Rotterdam)