For One More Hour with You

“In all this time, no one has ever talked to you about me. About who I was, how I lived and how I went away. I want to tell you my story, now that it’s been so long since I died.” The voice belongs to Alina Marazzi, but the words she speaks are those of her mother Luisa Marazzi Hoepli, who committed suicide when the director was seven years old.

Thirty years later, Marazzi reconstructs the hidden story of the great absence in her life, filling in the details of her hazy memories with excerpts from her mother’s diary, and the home videos shot by her grandfather between 1926 and 1972. The footage shows an attractive young woman growing up in a prosperous publishing family in Milan, and later finding apparent happiness as a wife and mother of two children. Her words testify to her great intelligence, but our knowledge of what is to come lends them a dark undertone. Nonetheless, Marazzi’s tribute to the woman whose very absence shaped her life is a hopeful one.