In her artistic and human journey, Carlotta Parodi crosses cinema, fashion and civic engagement as naturally as she wears a couture dress: never separating form and substance. At the ReWriters Fest, in the iconic space of the Alberto Sordi Gallery, she brought body positivity out of clichés, transforming it into a cultural and political act. Here beauty stops being a surface and becomes language, responsibility, a narrative of plural and undomesticated identities. A finalist at the Franco Solinas Prize with Redención, a protagonist of international projects and an interpreter of complex femininities, Carlotta embodies an idea of contemporary glamour: imperfect, conscious, deeply human. In this interview, she takes us inside her world, where fashion and cinema do not serve to hide reality, but to illuminate it.
At ReWriters Fest you brought the theme of body positivity to a cultural stage of excellence, such as the Mondadori in Galleria Alberto Sordi. How important is it today to combine beauty, fashion and social engagement to build new feminine and inclusive imagery?
Bringing the theme of body positivity to a place like the Mondadori at Galleria Alberto Sordi, within a structured cultural context like ReWriters Fest, was important precisely because it shifted the discourse from surface to substance. Beauty and fashion are not enemies of social engagement: they become problematic only when they stop questioning and are reduced to rigid, exclusive and unattainable models. Bringing these worlds together means putting back at the center the idea that the body is not an object to be corrected or standardized, but a space of identity, history and freedom. Fashion, cinema and art have a huge responsibility in the construction of the collective imagination: they can either reinforce stereotypes or open up possibilities. Today I feel that the real political gesture is just that: to show real, complex, undomesticated bodies, and to return beauty to its deepest meaning, which has nothing to do with perfection, but with the truth and uniqueness of each body, which has the right to exist as it is. The festival also hosted other panels dedicated to issues of great social relevance, such as the one led by Myrta Merlino, who highlighted the importance of reporting tools and awareness against online violence, particularly that aimed at women, or the one led by Eleonora Daniele, who delved into central issues such as youth mental health.
In your panel you dialogued with very different personalities from the world of entertainment to psychiatry to cultural journalism. What kind of energy arises when seemingly distant worlds come together to narrate the body as an identity and not as a stereotype?
When seemingly distant worlds meet, a very strong energy arises because each brings a different look at the body, identity and vulnerability. The choice to bring different fields, entertainment, fashion, psychiatry, and cultural journalism, into dialogue stemmed precisely from the desire to avoid a single or simplified reading and return to the body all its complexity. With Giovanni Ciacci, for example, the confrontation started from his career in fashion and television and his relationship with media exposure, to very concrete issues such as body judgment and the possibility of overturning deeply ingrained stereotypes. The recounting of her personal experiences, from her television career to symbolic gestures such as the same sex dance at Ballando con le Stelle, the first example of a couple formed by two men on the program, or being the first HIV-positive person to enter a reality show such as Big Brother VIP, helping to normalize a condition that is still strongly stigmatized, showed how much the representation of nonconforming bodies can become a real tool for change. With Leonardo Mendolicchio, however, the discussion shifted to a more essential but equally necessary plane: the relationship between body, identity and psychic suffering. His contribution helped to read the body not only as a public image, but as an emotional and psychological space, especially in its most fragile stages, bringing the discourse back to a dimension of care, responsibility and listening. Finally, the perspective of cultural journalism, brought by Valeria Manieri, expanded the discourse to the level of public narrative, highlighting how the way bodies are told in the media contributes to constructing, or unhinging, collective imaginaries, stereotypes and value hierarchies. Bringing such diverse voices together created an authentic confrontation in which the body emerged as identity, experience and relationship, not as a label or stereotype. It was an extraordinary experience for me, both on a professional and human level, and I thank Eugenia Romanelli for wanting me to lead this dialogue space, which I consider highly formative and which allowed me to meet professionals and people of great human value.
You are a finalist for the Premio Franco Solinas with Redención, a project set in New York City that gives voice to an invisible community. What fascinates you about border stories and why do you feel the need to bring them to the center of contemporary cinematic storytelling?
Redención was born from the desire to give voice to those who live on the margins of the public gaze, those existences that cross our cities daily without really being seen. The project was written in four hands with Andrea Antonio Vico, from an original idea of his, and together we felt from the beginning the need to build a story that would start from direct observation of reality. Andrea will also be directing, and this allowed us to think from the beginning about a deeply coherent work between writing and staging. When we decided to develop the project, Andrea and I were attending a drop-in center together in Brooklyn, the Sure We Can, where canners, mostly Mexicans, arrive every day, collecting bottles and cans to survive. Many of them do not speak English. I speak Spanish very well and, on those days, I would translate to Andrea in Italian what they told: their stories, their lives, their wounds.
Entering that center was not easy. I remember the physical impact very well: the very strong smell of alcohol and garbage, also due to the amount of empty beer bottles collected every day. I interviewed the canners one by one, listened to their stories, and had the feeling that they were literally putting their lives in my hands. Particularly Jose, who will be the main character in the story-I will follow and interview him during the collection, and we will both be present on stage for the duration of the film. A deep bond was formed with him. He would tell me about his family, his past, his everyday life. Every time he saw me he would ask, “¿Cuándo se rueda la película?” – “When is the film being made?” He felt that someone, finally, was listening to him. I am fascinated by border stories because that is where the strongest contradictions of our time emerge: between visibility and invisibility, between survival and dignity, between rhetoric and reality. Canners silently support an informal system of recycling that is fundamental to New York City, but they remain excluded from the official narrative, highly stigmatized by society. In this journey, Andrea chose to experience the canners firsthand, spending an entire day collecting bottles and cans to really understand what it meant. He also came out deeply affected by the sense of stigma that these people experience every day. I didn’t have the courage to do the same: I was afraid of rats, of finding potentially contaminating material. But because of that, I know how real what we are telling is. Bringing these stories to the center of the cinematic narrative means, for me, taking on a responsibility: shifting the gaze, questioning the system, restoring complexity to lives that are too often reduced to statistics or stereotypes. Redención was not born out of a desire to construct an “effect” story, but out of an urgency, mine and Andrea’s, to tell something that we feel is deeply ours, even at the cost of not liking it. Because there are realities that must be brought to the surface, that cannot remain underground. And cinema, when it is honest, can still be this: a space for listening, truth and responsibility.
In Redención you are scriptwriter, protagonist and direct observer of the reality you tell. How glamorous – in the deepest, non-superficial sense – is it to get your hands dirty with reality in order to give it back to the audience in an authentic way?
If we think of glamour as something glossy and distant from reality, then Redención is the exact opposite. But if we understand it in its deepest meaning, for me today glamour is an act of courage, an ethical choice, the ability to enchant precisely because one is real. To stand beside the canners, to follow them on their daily paths, to listen to their stories means giving up all forms of narrative comfort and taking on a very specific responsibility. We got our hands dirty in the most literal sense, as I explained in the previous answer. In this sense, glamour stops being appearance and becomes presence: not telling what is easy or seductive, but what is necessary. To return to the audience a complex, contradictory, living reality, without sugarcoating it or making it spectacular. I believe that today the most powerful cinema stems precisely from here: from the ability to stand in the real, to go through it with respect and to transform it into narrative without betraying it.
In the American film Heroes – The Crosses We Bear you play an intense antagonist without redemption. What is your relationship with dark characters and how much do they help you express a more complex, powerful and undomesticated femininity?
Actually, I don’t particularly like dark characters, especially extreme villains: they are often very far from me, from the way I feel and look at the world. For this very reason, however, they represent an acting challenge that I welcome with great interest. Casting myself in the shoes of someone who is distant to me, sometimes even morally opposed, is one of the most stimulating exercises in my work, because it forces me out of my comfort zone. In the case of Heroes – The Crosses We Bear, Alessandra Russo is an extreme, lucidly evil character, constructed without comforting shortcuts, and it is this clarity of writing that made the challenge all the more stimulating. It is clear that from a moral point of view I do not agree with anything of her choices. But interpreting her means getting into her value system, her internal logic, without softening or justifying her. It is uncomfortable work, disturbing at times, but necessary. These kinds of characters allow me to portray a femininity that does not ask for approval, that is neither tame nor reassuring, but complex and contradictory. I think it can also be interesting to represent female figures who do not have to be loved in order to be told, without this meaning justifying their actions or choices.
After winning the Vincenzo Crocitti International Award for International Actress in Career, what idea of success do you really feel is yours today, that of accolades or that of the freedom to choose who to be on and off the set?
My idea of success has more to do with adherence to one’s values. Freedom is one of them, and it is a privilege. To have the opportunity to tell something that you feel is deeply yours and in line with your values, artistic and ethical, is priceless. Awards are an important recognition of work done, but they have never been a goal in themselves. Rather, doing to the best of my ability what I am called to do, that is. I am a perfectionist, even in the least virtuous sense of the word. In the case of the Vincenzo Crocitti Award, it was an honor for me to share this recognition with artists who have made their mark on Italian cinema and entertainment, such as Paola Cortellesi, Kim Rossi Stuart, Paolo Conticini, Morgan, and Massimo Lopez. Off the set, success increasingly coincides with the ability to accept where one is, without constantly feeling that one is lagging behind external models. The work on self, which I have been doing for years, also profoundly affects the way I look at others and tell their stories. Today I feel that true success is to continue to evolve, staying true to one’s values and learning to live with complexity, without judging it.
