La Casa delle vedove

Baldi made this documentary entirely according to his typical procedure: for a long time, he studied his characters and all the facts, memories and experiences that had shaped their lives. Strengthened by this knowledge, he filmed them in their current circumstances. He already knew the answers to his questions, so he could fully concentrate on the situation in which he filmed. He made his characters look straight into the camera, but at the same time he tried, by means of a carefully chosen camera angle, to capture the light and colour that most potently reflected the emotion of the moment. In La casa delle vedove, he portrays a group of widows who, he thinks, lived in a constant ‘dialogue‘ with death. In the house where they all lived ‘every colour was saturated with that special reddish shade that you see everywhere in Rome, and furthermore the rooms were filled with a stale, musty smell.‘ (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)