Film Commission Torino Piemonte

From mother to daughter is a feature documentary about “Mondine”: female rice pickers and weeders, typical of northern Italy lowlands in the first half of the last century.
Nowadays twenty of them -- now in their 70s - sing in a choir work-songs learnt in the rice paddies, wearing the same straw hats they had when they were children. They travel from concert to concert, telling about their hardwork childhood and wartime years to the younger synthetic music generation. Bread, roses and - thanks to the electro-folk band Fiamma Fumana - electronic beats. Their music defends an ancient idea of XX century italian workers: work as a struggle for freedom.

Says director Andrea Zambelli: “What striked me more about the “mondine” is their lifepath: they lived their first years in a country shaken by fascism and war, starting working when they were ten, in an environment of total misery. They started riceweeding when they were thirteen and for some of them it went on until they were sixty. Their youth and their dreams were denied by the world they grew up in. In the choir, these women become protagonists: the choir allows them to discover once
again values of feminine sociability and collective action, that they learnt during rice weeding times. Ambitions and dreams typical of youth can be realized only now that
they are grown up. The rice paddy, that denied their youth, gives back to the “mondine” a human heritage that they express through their songs, in their shows, in the transmission of their experience to the new generations, thanks to the meeting with a rock band that melts traditional songs and new musical technics and styles.”