AllMovie

This documentary serves as an unofficial companion piece to Italian director Giuseppe de Santis's 1948 feautre Bitter Rice, 1950 Academy Award nominee for Best Story. This neorealist classic, for those unfamiliar with it, stars Silvana Mangano as Silvana, a young woman who earns her keep working arduously in the rice fields, harvesting the grains under the blazing sun in North Italy. The picture gained notoriety (and reeled in a massive audience) for sexy and earthy Mangano, who spent much of the film semi-clad - and made male viewers swoon. Whereas the de Santis film dramatized these events that became relatively common after World War II, Andrea Zambelli's From Mother to Daughter examines the actual events within a documentary context. It first travels back to the actual period, with archival footage of the workers that demonstrates how the women lived from day to day (driving trucks and tractors, bathing in streams, et cetera - always singing to keep their spirits up); Zambelli then interviews those among the women who are still living (now in their 70s and 80s). As Zambelli's film unfurls, it reveals an astonishing and colorful truth: a number of the women subsequently formed a singing ensemble during their golden years, and decided to tour Italy in that outfit, regularly performing the folks songs of their youth that majestically re-evoke that time. As the women congregate and talk on-camera, revealing their colorful, magnetic personalities, they tell detailed and evocative tales of the past and of the emotions they initially experienced.