A Trial for Rape and A.A.A.Offresi: An Italian Case

In the fall of 2024, we organized a two-part screening series at Arsenal Kino in Berlin as part of our research project, “Terms and Conditions.The two evenings in September, Feminist Film Practices and the Legal Framework of Moving Images, focused on feminist film practices that address violence against marginalized subjects, searching for formal and narrative strategies to avoid reproducing mechanisms of oppression. The second installment, Continuity of Coloniality and (Neo)Colonial Legal Processes, took place in October featured films that explore the historical continuity of coloniality and its legal contexts.

We are publishing here the text by film historian, curator, and archivist Annamaria Licciardello, who participated in the opening night of the program on feminist film practices challenging the legal framework of images. The evening was centered around the short film Corpo di Reato (Body of Evidence, 2024) by the Italian feminist collective “Collettiva,” (Marta Basso, Sara Cecconi, Carlotta Cosmai, and Alice Malingri). This work in progress is shedding light on the censorship of A.A.A. Offresi (1981), a film about sex work by feminist filmmakers Loredana Rotondo, Paola De Martis, Annabella Miscuglio, Rony Daopulo, Mariagrazia Belmonti, and Anna Carini, which was banned by Italian public television. On March 12, 1981, TV presenter Marina Morgan announced that A.A.A. Offresi would not be aired “at the formal request of the president of the parliamentary oversight commission”. Corpo di Reato reenacts the story and seeks a fictional revenge: the TV presenter’s announcement is interrupted by a group of activists in colorful balaclavas storming the studio to read the screenplay of the censored film. (See trailer here).

The short film was introduced by Annamaria Licciardello, who also provided a connection to another famous film by Anna Carini, Mariagrazia Belmonti, Paola De Martis, Rony Daopulo, Annabella Miscuglio, and Loredana Rotondo: A Trial for Rape (1979). This powerful document—made all the more relevant today by the tragic case of Gisèle Pelicot—can no longer be screened, becoming yet another paradoxical instance of censorship in the history of the Italian feminist collective that made it. While the film circulated widely and sparked debate in the late 1970s, it is currently unavailable for viewing, as Licciardello illustrates in her text, retracing the genesis of the multiple instances of censorship that have affected this collective of filmmakers.

COLLETTIVA has kindly agreed to share a clip of Corpo di Reato along with a statement about their research project.

By Annamaria Licciardello.

Maria Grazia Belmonti, Anna Carini, Rony Daopoulo, Paola De Martiis, Annabella Miscuglio and Loredana Rotondo are the directors of the two television documentaries, Processo per stupro [A Trial for Rape] (1979) and A.A.A. Offresi (1981), which, albeit at different times and in different ways, were censored by the RAI (Radiotelevisione italiana), Italy’s state television, that is, they suffered a broadcasting ban that made them invisible, concealed objects. I recall them, now that four of them are no longer there, because theirs is an emblematic story of how much a critical and feminist approach, still to this day, has difficulty finding space and recognition in mainstream media, being more often than not silenced and marginalized. The mode of censorship and its timing, as I said, are different, because in the case of A.A.A. Offresi the censorship occurred before the scheduled broadcast, while for A Trial for Rape it is a more recent and indirect form of concealment.

Since the early 1970s, the six women have more or less actively participated in the feminist movement. Two of them, Annabella Miscuglio and Rony Daopoulo, founded the Feminist Cinema Collective of Rome in 1971, which created the first two Italian feminist films, Aggettivo donna [The Adjective Woman] (1972) and La lotta non è finita [The Struggle Is Not Over] (1973), and organized Kinomata in Rome in 1976, the first festival of women’s cinema to award prizes. Having concluded the experience of this first collective, they decided, together with Maria Grazia Belmonti, Anna Carini and Paola De Martiis, to collectively continue the activity of audiovisual production. The transition from militant and independent film production to production for public television occurred thanks to two factors, one external and one internal. In 1975, the RAI, which controlled the only two channels existing at the time under a monopoly regime (private television channels would not arrive until the early 1980s), was reformed, driven by the demand for renewal and participation that had spread throughout the country after ’68. With the reform, management and control of RAI passed from the government to Parliament, which implemented them through the “Parliamentary Supervisory Commission,” meaning greater autonomy for the three RAI channels (the third would begin broadcasting in 1979). Especially the second channel, directed by Massimo Fichera, linked to the Italian Socialist Party, gave space to the need for pluralism and democratization and welcomed broadcasts and projects with an open eye toward the social and youth movements that were disruptively traversing the country during those years. For the first time, programs were aired that were made by women on issues emerging within the feminist movement, such as Si dice donna [She Calls Herself Woman], Riprendiamoci la vita [Let’s Take Back Our Lives], Donne in prima persona [Women in the First Person]. This period of openness would last only a few years; already in the early 1980s, Italy’s political and cultural changes, repression and the reaction to political violence, closed the doors of television to the most advanced social demands. It is in this context that the two documentaries, A Trial for Rape and A.A.A. Offresi are made and financed by RAI. In order to work for television, the group of filmmakers joins the MTC (Maestranze tecnici cinematografici) cooperative, an independent production company that has already been working for RAI for several years. It is the cooperative that produces the two works under a contract with the channel directed by Fichera. The collective’s connection to the RAI is personified by its full member Loredana Rotondo, who had been working for RAI programming for several years and had already collaborated with MTC on other productions.

A Trial for Rape, first aired twice in 1979 (the first time in the spring at 10 p.m., the second in the fall during prime time), is an immediate media sensation but also a great success for RAI. It is watched by millions of viewers, wins an award for best TV documentary of the year, is presented at the Berlin Film Forum and sold in many foreign countries. For the first time, a real rape trial “enters the homes of Italians” in the form of an hour-long documentary and without any voice-over commentary, but through the conscious and critical gaze of six female directors. The choice to make a documentary on the topic of rape is clearly not accidental. It is an issue strongly felt and debated in the feminist movement especially in its legal aspects (in 1978, rape was still a crime against public morals and would only become a crime against the person in 1996) and its courtroom representations. The finger is pointed at the institutional violence and secondary victimization women suffer in the courtrooms. In those years, these issues led feminist collectives to be present at trials alongside and in support of women who had had he courage to denounce their rapists. So the collective decided to follow the case at the Latina Tribunal of a young woman defended by lawyer Tina Lagostena Bassi, a feminist advocate involved in many rape trials. The filming took place during two days of the trial thanks to a permission granted by the President of the Tribunal itself (as indicated by a credit at the beginning of the documentary).

The importance and innovativeness of A Trial for Rape was not only emphasized “hot off the press,” immediately after the broadcast, but also subsequently both in Italian books about television history and in ones covering legal studies because of the exceptional role taken by a documentary in the debate on legal reforms concerning sexual violence. Yet this unanimously positive assessment of the documentary’s relevance could not protect it from a rare case of retroactive “censorship.” In fact in recent years, RAI has ceased to rebroadcast the documentary, as it used to do in the years after 1979, but also does not even allow it to be screened in front of a movie-theater audience, citing unspecified “legal issues.” Requests for clarification, which have come from many quarters, have always fallen on deaf ears. The wall raised by the RAI around this film and its decision to no longer make it available presumably is due to the legal status of the work itself. Procurement contracts, such as the one signed between the MTC cooperative and RAI for the production of A Trial for Rape, generally stipulate that all rights to the documentary, both economic and in terms of authorship, are transferred to the television company as their exclusive owner. The actual authors, therefore, have no say in the fate of their creative work, which “officially” is not even deemed theirs. The RAI considers it “repertoire” it can use (or not to use) at will and not an intellectual work to be protected. Ironically, the contract that allowed the authors to make their own documentary and show it to millions of people also sanctioned the divestment of all their rights to it.

Of a completely different nature is the censorship suffered by the documentary A.A.A. Offresi, made by the authors immediately after A Trial for Rape. Due to the success of the latter, the six women were commissioned by RAI to produce another project right away. They decide to work on the theme of prostitution, but what they focus on is: “the contract, the passage of money that is the basis of this social practice. That is, we want to overturn the optics with which the ‘phenomenon’ has always been looked at so far: The center of the investigation must not be the woman but the demand, the need for prostitution” (Belmonti et al, Véronique, 1981).¹

To carry out the project, Véronique, a French prostitute who occasionally works in Italy, is brought in. Filming lasts a few weeks, using the candid camera method. The six women record from behind a mirrored glass with three cameras and two microphones directed to different areas of the room, and the clients are unaware they are being recorded. The focus is not on the sexual acts as much as on what precedes and follows them: the economic bargaining, the relationship between the clients and Véronique, on their conduct. Solarizations, cuts, and sound manipulations are used to render the clients unrecognizable. This description, however, does not come from watching the documentary as much as from the newspaper articles and the book the six authors published about their work as well as the discussions in the media and the legal case that followed. Although it passed the scrutiny of RAI’s legal experts, the airing of A.A.A. Offresi, scheduled for March 5, 1981, in fact, is blocked by the chairman of the Supervisory Commission [Commissione di Vigilanza] at the urging of some Christian Democratic deputies. From that moment on, a huge scandal explodes with numerous articles for and against the documentary and its possibility of being broadcast and about the censorship put in place by the RAI top management under political pressure. The Roman public prosecutor’s office opens an investigation after receiving complaints from citizens and organizations such as the National Association for Decency, which leads to the seizure of the film and the indictment of the authors, Véronique, some Rai executives and the president of the MTC cooperative that had produced the documentary, on charges of exploitation of prostitution and violation of privacy. It is a very hard blow for the directors, subjected to a blame and stigma for wanting to lift the veil from prostitution without prudery and romanticism, and for putting the client at the center. The trial ultimately ended only in 1995 with the acquittal of all the defendants, but the seizure of the film was confirmed and it has therefore remained buried in the archives of the Court of Rome ever since.

The inauspicious fate of A.A.A. Offresi, just two years after the success of A Trial for Rape, came at a time of retreat and a “return to order” with respect to the openings toward a different way of making television inaugurated with the 1975 reform. It is no coincidence, for example, that in the same period, the program Si dice donna [She Calls Herself Woman], which had been on the air with excellent results since September 1977, was also abruptly discontinued. The few spaces of accessibility and visibility for programs and documentaries such as the ones mentioned here within public television were eliminated as soon as Italy entered the changed political phase of the 1980s. The first to suffer are precisely the feminist filmmakers of the collective who, apart from the trauma of the painful trial they had to endure, came to be severely marginalized. If individually they gradually resumed collaborating with RAI, apart from Maria Grazia Belmonti who went down another path, they were never again able to do so together. Their shared project of feminist documentary filmmaking, which produced works of unquestionable impact (and perhaps more could have been produced), born of a profound political and theoretical awareness, was violently interrupted and their individual careers were stifled within the RAI’s new structure.

A.A.A. Offresi forty years later remains invisible. RAI, as the rights holder, could ask for its release, but to date it has not done so. On the contrary, as seen earlier, it has decreed the invisibility of A Trial for Rape as well (apart from a ten-minute excerpt available on the website of RAI’s archives “RAI teche”).² The hope is that at least for the latter film the decision to conceal it will be reversed and a way will be found to restore the proper place to such an important and – sadly – topical work.

1 M.G. Belmonti, A. Carini, R. Daopoulo, P. De Martiis, A. Miscuglio, Veronique, Milano, 1981.

2 “Il 26 aprile 1979 andava in onda ‘Processo per stupro,’” video clip, excerpt from the film, 10:21 min, on the website RAI Teche, <https://www.teche.rai.it/2019/04/26-aprile-1979-andava-onda-processo-stupro/> [accessed 24 March 2025].