Actor-turned director Anna Foglietta is back in Venice in a different guise this year, after serving as the event’s official emcee in 2020. Foglietta — who is best-known to international audiences for her role in Italy’s smash hit “Perfect Strangers” — is on the Lido with her directorial debut, “A Common Story.” It’s a marriage drama toplined by Alba Rohrwacher, whose credits include Pablo Larraín’s “Maria” and who served on the 2025 Cannes competition jury panel. Rohrwacher plays a middle-aged woman named Erika whose relationship with her husband, Mauro, and their simple life in the countryside is disrupted when their daughter Irene leaves to go to university abroad.
Their house feels empty, and the balance on which they had based their lives seems to crumble. The film, being sold by True Colours, is produced by HT Film, Indigo Film, Tenderstories and Blu One Lab with support from Rai Cinema and in collaboration with HBO Max. Foglietta spoke to Variety about working with Rohrwacher and shares her thoughts about Venice’s gender imbalance.
From my observation of the world. I spend a lot of time with the parents of my children’s friends. I’ve realized that, even observing myself as a parent, we’ve truly become too child-centric.
Our obsession with everything a child does from the moment it is born is perhaps the fundamental alibi that allows us to effectively avoid taking care of ourselves [as adults]. There is a whole generation that does not really know itself and doesn’t have the will or the desire to do so. So together with screenwriter Matteo Ferri, with whom I wrote the story, I started to think about how to bring these elements together.
I thought about a very simple couple. I’m very passionate about the part of humanity that never basks in the spotlight. They deploy energies and strategies to keep this world turning, but nobody cares.
It always seems that great revolutions, even profound emotional and psychoanalytic ones, are always the prerogative of the bourgeoisie just because they have all the right cultural tools. So I focused on two very simple people. Smart, with great emotional intelligence.
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