Rosa and Rina are two old women that live in a place/
space limits: Rosa in a rest home,assisted by a member
of the staff called Anna. Rina in an Apartment, assisted
day!and night by her carer Helena. As the title reveals,
because of the peculiar symbolic/evocative valence, the
dolls serve as a fitting narrative with the stories of Rosa
and Rina, which are taken by the cameras in their own
homes, focusing the gaze on the moments and the
activities that take place during their days. Activities that
are always the same: dressing, breakfast, physiotherapy,
walk, lunch, afternoon rest, recreation, television
entertainment, dinner and preparing for night.
The cameras will follow the movements and activities of
Rose and Rina from morning until night, always in the
company of their assistants. In fact Helena and Anna are
the tellers of these stories, from a peculiar role and point
of view. They tell this stories not filtered by the
information received from external people (family
members, relatives and friends), but on the basis of
personal and emotional relationship that has been
created in the time spent together.
The story of this documentary starts from the dolls.
Objects, things, toys, more or less old, more or less
treated, unkempt, or naked, made of netting or of plastic.
Dolls that sometimes live in the living rooms or in
bedrooms of old ladies. Dolls that look at you and stare.
Dolls that feel, in silence, your presence.
And are these dolls to symbolically represent, by their
presence, the deepest and surreal sense of the old-age;
peculiar condition of space/border, social and existential
passage of life in a time that it becomes "duration".
The dolls are also the two main characters of this story.
Women, who become older, seem like dolls with their
glance. Eyes deep, detached and ironic, sometimes
inscrutable. With that look sad and disillusioned seems to
tell us that they were young women.
They make us enter into the condition of “old age”, the
last part of the journey that each of us, inevitably, must
do. A scary journey that, as a serious illness, evokes in
our mind, in our western culture, the idea of death. We
are missing the meaning of the old age. Because we lack
the ability to live life in all its phases, especially in the “old
age”, at that time when we should be free at last from
fear.
Emma Irene Orlandi (Fotografa di scena)
Superottimisti - Archivio regionale di film di famiglia (immagini d'archivio)
Rosa Daneluzzi e Rina Orlandi