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A portrait of the elderly Maria di Capriati, the woman who christened Mangini as a baby, and whom Mangini considered a godmother figure. As in all of her other films, any direct assertion of her connection to her subject is absent. Instead, di Capriati is presented as the centre of her own universe. She is the still-active keeper of a rural estate who quarrels with locals from the top of her horse-drawn cart, the witchy woman with piercing eyes who causes mischief-making children to flee. The voice-over implies that this is a headstrong woman who refuses to accept her current situation: that of undergoing, in the face of modernity and ageing, a sort of crisi della presenza (a “crisis of presence”, from De Martino). In the narration’s words, her delusions manifest as a desire to prove, in the embodied first-person, that “I’m still here, I’m still useful”. Yet, observing her alone as she fills her empty hours, Mangini also gives us access to moments that defy her outward persona, as she tenderly devotes herself to God, animals, children and her memories, which she calls up to “leaf through the past when in doubt about the present”.
