The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza: Writing for emancipation

Coralie Martin

With: Valeria Golino

Between 1967 and 1976, Goliarda Sapienza wrote The Art of Joy, a subversive fresque set in her 20th Century Italy. The dazzling social rise of its rebellious heroine, Modesta, from her miserable childhood in Sicily to the upper worlds of the aristocratie reveals a sharp and emancipated bisexual character who stands up against all systems of domination – the Church, fascism, the mafia, patriarchy… Too outrageous to be published at the time, the novel left its author to die in poverty and anonymity.
100 years after Goliarda Sapienza’s birth, this documentary sheds an unprecedented light on this cursed but nonetheless empowering masterpiece.