MOLLY BLOOM

2016, 20”, produced by Jacopo Quadri – Ubulibri, co–produced by In Between Art Film and Vivo film

CHIARA CASELLI

Born in Bologna, she is an actress and photographer. She has acted, among others, for Michelangelo Antonioni, Liliana Cavani, Marco Tullio Giordana, Gus Van Sant, and Mia Handsen- Love. In 2008 she began to exhibit her photography; in 2011 she was at the Biennale di Venezia, in 2014 her first solo exhibit in Tokyo. In 2000 she debuted as a director with the short Per sempre, which was in competition at the 57th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica di Venezia, and won the Nastro d’Argento Prize.

Chiara Caselli’s film Molly Bloom (2016) is a plunge into the heart, mind, and flesh of Molly, the main character of the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In the film, we find Molly Bloom in her bed, unable to sleep. Next to her face are the feet of her husband Leopold, who fell asleep upside-down and fully dressed. Molly’s voice — her irreverent, tragic, and childlike spirit — leads us on a journey through her life and the people who inhabit it, whether living or imaginary. The present time is then interwoven with a past that haunts her, and a future that offers her what she feels she has lost, forever.

“I was 12 when I first met Molly: she was Piera degli Esposti, playing her at a theatre in Bologna where my mother brought me. An indelible encounter. In that period, I began to take photographs. It was only many years later that I fully grasped the connection with Molly, when the desire to convey interior life through images became the centre of my work” — Chiara Caselli.