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Shot in Martano, Stendalí is the record of a female mourning ritual – enacted within ethnic Greek communities that spoke Griko, a dialect that can still be found in southern Puglia – on the brink of extinction. When Mangini arrived in the town in 1960, she could find only two women who remembered fragments of the chants; they told her, “‘When we are gone, the lamentations will be gone, too.” Despite its observational style – albeit sped up in the edit, sometimes to comical effect – the film is in fact entirely reconstructed and restaged. Believing funeral chants to be one of the highest forms of poetry, Mangini entrusted Pasolini to work with the two women’s memories to create a Griko ‘replica’ and to write a narrated script in Italian, voiced by actress Lilla Brignone. The addition of voice-over meant that Mangini didn’t have to choose between integrating Italian translation or subtitles, which she believed would disrupt the rhythm of the songs and the relationship between sound and image.
