by Giulia Cosentino & Perla Sardella
16min | Italy/Spain | 2025
Emilia and Caterina write letters to each other revisiting their adolescent memories and earliest experiences at a boarding school in the 1950s.
Did they choose the lives they truly wanted, or only those that they dared to imagine?
International Title The First Times
Year of production 2025
Length 16′
Country Italy/Spain
Shooting Format 8mm
Aspect Ratio 16:9
Dialogue Italian
Directors Giulia Cosentino, Perla Sardella
Producers Margot Mecca, Matteo Tortone
Production Company Malfé Film
Co-Producers Ainhoa Andraka, Zuri Goikoetxea
Co-Production Company Doxa producciones
Writers Giulia Cosentino, Perla Sardella
Cinematographers Giulia Cosentino, Perla Sardella, Luciana Castellina, Valentini, De Abbondi
Editors Ainhoa Andraka, Davide Minotti, Perla Sardella
Sound Marzia Cordò
Music Sapore
Cast Emma Beonio Brocchieri, Sveva Romana Candelletta
Director’s Statement
Le prime volte is the clash of two (double) gazes, our perspectives through the construction of those of the protagonists. The story of Caterina and Emilia is told through our languages. The two chapters see them both as protagonists but from two different points of view.
Amateur cinema offers us material shot almost exclusively by men, who, as heads of families, became the holders of the family memory and write its story. The shots that make up these films are modelled on male desire.
Our intention is to use some of these private memories to rewrite them according to another type of desire and gaze, the female one, which has remained unexpressed for too long.
The decision to twist the documentary value of these images is a political act of re-appropriation: by replacing those who film, we also replace those who hold the power to tell the story. So the archive images, originally shot by male filmmakers, in this film belong to the gaze of Emilia and Caterina. It is not a philological work but serves as a tool for reading the images. The viewer gives a different interpretation of the images when they know that they are filmed by women rather than men.
Working on a film like this gives us the opportunity to tell the story of two protagonists from their personal points of view.
In making this film, we each started from our own references and followed our own authorial path. The result is two chapters adopting different languages but with a common guide. We chose to work considering two planes that the available material offered us: the “visible” and the “secret”.
Emilia and Caterina’s words are shaped by written boards. This is because the written form is the one that offers us the opportunity to work on the diary and epistolary form and to get more intimate with the characters. Emilia and Caterina write to each other, finally free. The audio is instead carried through by the voices of Caterina and Emilia at boarding school, in a distant time, as if they were moments from their past, from their nights peeping through memory.
