Oriana Fallaci Miniseries Debuts in Italy
Journalist who famously once took off her chador while interviewing Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini gets domestic biopic.
Here in the U.S., we have Oprah. And for many years in Italy, the female media zeitgeist was all about Oriana. A.k.a. Oriana Fallaci. A.k.a. “La Fallaci.”
Her exploits are somewhat unfamiliar to a new generation of Italian bloggers, so a major effect of this week’s two-part Italian RAI-TV miniseries L’Oriana is to remind the Instagram and Twitter set what she was all about. From a report by AFP Rome bureau chief Olivier Baube:
“Telling the story of the life of Oriana Fallaci is a bit like telling the story of the 20th century,” said Marco Turco, director of the miniseries. “It is hard to imagine a more cinematic life than hers.”
Vittoria Puccini, who plays her in the film, added: “We tried to portray Oriana the journalist, the war correspondent… but also her human, more intimate and sometimes more fragile side, which was revealed in her relationships with men.”
Fallaci had two great loves in her life: French journalist Francois Pelou, whom she met in Vietnam where he was AFP’s bureau chief, and Alexandros Panagoulis, a Greek anarchist and poet who was a leading figure in the fight against the “Colonels” military junta and was to die in a car crash in 1976 three years after they met. She told the story of their tumultuous relationship in her novel A Man.
Fallaci, who started out her reporting career with a set visit to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita(!), passed away in 2006. RIP.
[Poster courtesy: RAI]
