Stories

During the “Women in the Italian film industry” panel at Oxford Brookes University’s Creative Industries Festival (2025), led by Silvia Dibeltulo and Daniela Treveri Gennari, we had the honour to converse with Lilia Hartmann Trapani, an esteemed Italian casting director, who worked on projects such as Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002) and Ildikó Enyedi’s The story of my wife (2021). Though she pursued a degree in History, she soon realized her true passion was cinema. Her mother, Isa Bartalini, was Italy’s first casting director, and she worked with iconic directors like Alessandro Blasetti and Billy Wilder, inspiring Trapani to follow in her footsteps. She began her profession as her mother’s assistant before forging her own career path and establishing Studio t Casting in 1985. While her early work primarily focused on international commercials, it wasn’t long before she transitioned into cinema: her career as an international casting director took off with Gangs of New York, but she also worked on very different productions such as Zoolander 2 (2016) and Mary Magdalene (2018), as well on several television shows such as the Count of Montecristo (2024) and Unwanted (2023).

Entering a personal archive means gaining access to someone’s life, meeting someone unknown before and, in a certain sense, invading a personal space. Depending on the type of archive, you will find more or less personal objects and documents, but all of them tell a story, an individual’s story. Sometimes this story is strongly related to his or her work, but in some instances it is more personal. For this reason, it is with a sort of reverential respect, almost on tiptoe, that I inspect and rummage into someone’s papers.

I’ve been a journalist for twenty-five years. In my career I’ve interviewed many film professionals, mostly directors, but the Women in Italian Film Production project was such a different experience for me.For the project, with my colleagues Daniela Treveri Gennari and Silvia Dibeltulo, I conducted thirty-eight interviews with female film professionals working in the Italian film industry.