Filmmaker Edoardo Ponti On
Directing his Iconic Mother
Sophia Loren

From the silent era to today, Italian women have stepped behind the camera to tell their stories. We've partnered with Directed By Women to keep those stories alive by featuring women who gave and continue to give voice to the female experience through cinema.

Director Michela Occhipinti makes films about faraway places and unusual topics perhaps because they are a reflection of her life, which has been nothing short of extraordinary. An Italian filmmaker, she was the only one in her family to actually have been born in Italy. Her father, the son of a French-Algerian mother and Sicilian father, was born in Tunisia. Her mother was born in Switzerland and her brother was born in Cairo. Her father was a diplomat, so the family was constantly on the move. Occhipinti spent her childhood moving through Rome, Hong Kong, Geneva and Congo. 

When she was 14, she returned to Rome where she stayed for about 9 years and then moved to Milan for two years. That’s where her professional life began. She started working in a publishing house and then as a copywriter at an advertising agency. But she felt the desire to go abroad again. That desire took her to London where she found a job working on documentaries. She had set out to be a writer but then found that it really wasn’t her calling. She knew that she somehow wanted to tell stories, so she found the better medium through documentary filmmaking because her instinct is to think in images.