Presented by Mazzino Montinari
Two podcasts by Sara Poma in which the personal and the collective overlap continuously, in painful accounts that speak not only of the horrors of brute force and ruthless power, but also acts of resistance and solidarity
FIGLIE
Argentina, 1978. Silvia is a thirty-five-year-old architect opposed to the dictatorship who is kidnapped by the military together with her daughter Sofia, who is only two. From that moment on, mother and daughter will never see each other again: while Sofia will be delivered to her grandparents shortly after being seized, Silvia becomes one of the 30,000 desaparecidos who never came home. Milan, 2022. Sofia, who has grown up in Italy, meets Sara Poma. The two women learn that they share an urgent personal need: to process their grief over the deaths of their mothers and tell the tale. Sara also lost her mother when she was very young, and feels compelled to make a trip to Argentina to look for Silvia and ponder the nature of a trauma that has accompanied both women for all their adult lives, albeit in different ways.
LA CITTÀ DELL’AMIANTO
This is the story of Casale Monferrato and the Eternit factory, but it is also the story of three women – a doctor, a teacher, and a journalist – and an entire community that rebelled against its dire fate. From the early 20th century, the same factory that promised jobs and prosperity to the residents in Casale Monferrato in Piedmont covered the small city in the dust we know as asbestos, a killer substance that killed thousands. The paths of the three women cross in the 1980s, when they realize it is the dust from the factory that is ravaging all that they hold dear. This is the story of a response to injustice and a civic revolution that says no to more deaths. It’s the story of a community that draws strength from the traumas it shares and turns them into a vital life force.
Sara Poma was born in Pavia and has worked in digital content for over twenty years. She got her start at MTV Italia, managing first its website and then its social media, the moved on to Twitter Italia and an array of different creative agencies. Today she is in charge of editorial content at Chora and Will Media. Passionate about podcasts, she has written and narrated several series, including Carla, una ragazza del Novecento (2020), inspired by a family diary; and Prima (2021), dedicated to Maria Silvia Spolato, the first person in Italy to come out as homosexual: the latter of which Poma turned into a book, Il coraggio verrà, published by Harper Collins in 2023. More recently, she has made the podcasts Figlie and La città d’amianto. Her latest effort, the podcast Con gli occhi di Anna, is about the life of the physician and revolutionary Anna Kuliscioff, and has just come out, days before Noir in Festival gets underway.
