Lorenzo Daniele has started filming “Finding Marta“, which draws on the close correspondence between the Nobel Prize winner and the actress he fell in love with, played here by Margherita Peluso, a brilliant interpreter of Pirandello’s theater.

The film “Finding Marta. A documentary on Pirandello’s Muse”, directed by Lorenzo Daniele and produced by Fine Art Produzioni srl, with the support of the Sicilia Film Commission.

Work on the film began a few weeks ago and will finish in the spring. It involves an entirely Sicilian artistic and technical crew, from screenwriter Alessandra Cilio to DoP Mauro Italia, to costume designer Rosy Bellomia.

The protagonist is Margherita Peluso, an actress of Modica origins and a brilliant interpreter of Pirandello’s theatre. It is she who decides to reconstruct the story of the actress Marta Abba, muse of Luigi Pirandello, and her relationship with the Sicilian Nobel Prize winner. The starting point was a close correspondence between the two (over 800 letters), kept in the house in the Kaos district in Agrigento, in Rome and in the library of Princeton University, in the United States. Here Margherita meets Pietro Frassica, professor at the prestigious University of New Jersey, certainly one of the leading experts on the Pirandello-Abba relationship.
Margherita, therefore, will embark on a journey through the places and situations that have marked Pirandello’s dramatic career and his tormented passion for the Milanese actress, an enterprising and stubborn woman, who with her interpretations has been able to spread and promote Pirandello’s theater all over the world. Within the documentary there are “cameos” in which Marta Abba speaks in the first person. And it is Margherita herself who, as on a theatrical stage, takes off her modern clothes and puts on those of Pirandello’s muse, in suggestive Sicilian locations, such as the nineteenth-century Rocca delle Tre Contrade residence on the slopes of Etna or the historic wagons of the Circumetnea.

«Margherita totally identifies with Marta – says the director Lorenzo Daniele – with whom she shares many things: she is a theater and cinema actress, she is Milanese, she has a bond with Sicily, she often works in the USA and abroad; but above all, she lives her career as a theater actress as a vocation, an indispensable sacrifice to Art. Between Sicily, Rome, Milan and New York, Margherita meets scholars, actors and authors who loved Marta Abba’s art and are ready to tell it, underlining its pioneering aspects but also the artistic merits of what has too often been remembered as “Pirandello’s lover”».