With Fuori, hitting theaters on December 3, director Mario Martone delivers one of his most personal and politically charged works. The Naples-born filmmaker brings the magnetic presence of Goliarda Sapienza back to life—a cult Italian writer who gained posthumous recognition with her novel The Art of Joy. Rather than adapting that seminal work, Martone takes a different path: through prison bars, emotional fragility, and the burning desire of a woman refusing to be silenced.

A Journey into the Shadows of an Overlooked Artist

Fuori resists the classic biopic formula. Instead, it draws inspiration from two autobiographical texts—The University of Rebibbia and The Certainties of Doubt—in which Sapienza recounts in vivid detail her brief stint in prison in 1980, after a desperate attempt led her to steal jewelry. Destitute and isolated, she ended up behind bars.

Yet Martone doesn’t frame this episode as a downfall, but rather as a revelation. His lens captures the uniquely feminine world of incarceration with quiet intimacy, focusing on the subtle gestures of survival, sisterhood, and inner disintegration. The result isn’t voyeuristic but strikingly observational, with the realism of a documentary.

Sapienza, played with fierce tenderness by Valeria Golino, comes across as a woman who could never be boxed in—neither by poverty, social norms, nor the cultural and political systems that often shut her out.

Fuori: Freedom as Fracture and Promise

The title—Fuori, meaning “outside” in Italian—goes beyond the literal post-prison context. It captures everything Sapienza represents: a space outside categories, outside binaries, beyond the sanitized stories Italy of the 1980s preferred to tell itself.

The movie lingers over the delicate process of reintegration, especially in Sapienza’s reconnection with Roberta, a young woman shaped by heroin addiction, systemic violence, and a shattered past. Their relationship becomes the emotional anchor of the narrative.

A Complex Bond Woven with Care, Desire, and Internal Struggle

Roberta is a beautifully chaotic figure—fragile, raw, and torn by contradictions—embodying the unspoken tensions of a queer desire that hasn’t yet learned how to name itself. She teeters between attraction and fear, craving closeness while instinctively keeping her guard up, trapped by a society that’s only taught her to survive, not to live.

Opposite her, Sapienza offers unwavering freedom. She makes no demands, only creates space—for listening, for healing, for possibility. While Roberta stumbles through uncertainty, Goliarda walks with the clarity of someone who has paid too high a price for authenticity to ever disown it again.

Martone films their dynamic with exceptional nuance. There’s no romanticization, no manufactured drama—just a simmering blend of physical, intellectual, and emotional tension. Fuori becomes a quiet study of unspoken desire, suspended between friendship and love, and the vulnerability of loving when love has always been denied you.

Goliarda Sapienza: A Queer Icon Ahead of Her Time

One of the film’s greatest achievements is reclaiming the unapologetically queer essence of Sapienza—in the broad, political, transgressive sense of the word. Actress, activist, writer, and intellectual partner to male thinkers though deeply involved with women, she drifts through the film as a woman in constant rebellion against societal moldings.

Martone doesn’t canonize her. He shows her bruised, lost, and deeply human—but never broken. That refusal to surrender is what made Goliarda Sapienza such a revolutionary writer. Her entire life was a relentless pursuit of untamed joy, and of intimate and sexual freedom outside of prescribed roles.

Valeria Golino is stunning in the role—subtle, layered, and alive to contradictions. She doesn’t resolve Sapienza’s complexities; she inhabits them.

A Story That Speaks to the Present

Though set in the 1980s, Fuori feels eerily current. In an era where rights are backsliding and normative pressures are re-emerging in new forms, Sapienza’s portrait echoes like a rallying call. To be “outside” today means resisting patriarchy, heteronormativity, and dominant narratives with intention and clarity.

Martone crafts an elegant and urgent statement—that freedom isn’t a destination but a daily, demanding practice. Vulnerable, imperfect, but necessary.

A Radiant Tribute to Women Who Don’t Fit the Mold

In bringing Sapienza’s memory to life, Fuori does more than honor a literary legend. It breathes life into a lineage of women—artists, inmates, lovers, outsiders—whose lives have too often been erased or rewritten by others.

This is cinema as restoration and recognition. A film that insists on telling the stories of lesbian desire when it had no voice, and reminds us that silence can leave lasting scars.

To explore more about the film’s release and background, visit the dedicated feature on the LGBTQIA+ platform: Cannes 2025 – Fuori.