Mirella

At 2025, 97 min, dir. Oliver Bruck

Born on a vast farmstead in Kenya to a former Italian cavalry officer and a student of Rodin, lovers who abandoned their marriages to create a new life, Mirella Ricciardi grew up steeped in the contradictions and reckless optimism of empire. Ricciardi captured her world, photographing East African communities in what would become the iconic Vanishing Africa, and became famous overnight. Celebrated for its intimacy and craft, the work also bears the imprint of the colonial gaze, its aesthetics of disappearance raising ambiguities around authorship, representation, and power.

A striking figure both in front of and behind the camera, she found herself in the artistic elite of 1960s Rome, where she was admired, photographed, and often exoticized her colonial origins and arresting beauty fuelling a fascination that was not entirely her own. She even played herself in Antonioni's L'Eclisse, embodying a version of herself shaped as much by others' gaze as by her own. Now in her nineties, Ricciardi chooses not to have her face filmed. Her presence lingers only through her voice and the images she allows, as she attempts to guide director Oliver Bruck with an elusive but forceful hand. The result is a portrait defined as much by absence as appearance.

MIRELLA is a meditation on power, beauty, and loss. At its core lies a woman who, in her life, negotiates the tension between authorship, visibility, and erasure, shaped by a colonial world she once embodied but that no longer exists.

festivals

National and World Premiere open

pictures

© Oliver Bruck

© Vanishing Africa Ltd / Carlo Bavagnoli / Courtesy of Mirella Ricciardi Archive

© Oliver Bruck

© Vanishing Africa Ltd / Courtesy of Mirella Ricciardi Archive

© Vanishing Africa Ltd / Mirella Ricciardi / Courtesy of Mirella Ricciardi Archive

© Vanishing Africa Ltd / Courtesy of Mirella Ricciardi Archive

© Vanishing Africa Ltd / Courtesy of Mirella Ricciardi Archive

© Vanishing Africa Ltd / Sofia Brignone / Courtesy of Mirella Ricciardi Archive