Award-winning Italian director Emanuele Crialis disclosed on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival that he was born a woman while introducing his autobiographical movie “L’Immencita,” starring Penelope Cruz.
The main character of “L’Immensita” is an Italian family growing up in Rome in the 1970s. The eldest daughter, played by Cruz, identifies as a guy and is already involved with her mother and her abusive, unfaithful father. That only serves to exacerbate the bad relationship further.
He remarked, speaking in public for the first time about his transition, “I was born biologically a woman, but it does not imply that I don’t have in me a significant part (that is a) female character. That is perhaps the best part of me.
“At a certain point I had to make a choice … of whether to live or to die. You don’t choose to make that sort of journey. You are born that way,” he added.
While he avoided going into specifics of his transition, he did say that, like in his frequently moving film, he relied on his mother for support and understood the worry it caused her.
Cruz’s initially ebullient persona in the Italian-language film crumbles under the weight of her controlling husband and her difficult trio of kids, who all suffer the scars of growing up in an unhappy home.
Cruz, who took home the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival last year for “Parallel Mothers,” claimed that her heroine is stuck in a predicament from which there is no way out.
