Gloria!

The end of the eighteenth century, a convent school near Venice. The girls are taught music; there is a choir, an orchestra, and the school's income comes from these performances. A work is to be composed for the visit of the new pope and the school's music master is charged with writing it. Teresa works there as a servant and nobody knows she is interested in music. In one room she finds an old keyboard instrument. She begins to play, and the sound she makes does not belong to that period. The other girls hear it. Margherita Vicario directs. Galatea Bellugi and Carlotta Gamba are in the cast. It is an Italian production. The film was shown at the Berlin Film Festival and is the director's first feature. Vicario is known as a musician and made the music herself. Its most striking choice is the sound; although it is a period film the music is deliberately contemporary, and that is the film's idea. Its ground is historical: there were women musicians trained in the orphanage schools of Venice and their orchestras were among the famous ensembles of the period. The matter it works at is authorship; works written by women were credited to others, and the film takes that as its subject directly. Its limit is structure; the narrative leaves some strands unfinished and the ending comes quickly. Who it is for: viewers who like period films grounded in music and formal experiment. Who it is not for: it cannot be watched expecting historical realism, there are many characters, and the narrative is loose.