Apologies for the Italian title, but it's very relevant since the official screening starts today at the Venice Film Festival!
About the movie "The Girl With The Leica":
Paris, 14 July 1937. Before returning to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Gerda Taro spends one last day with Robert Capa and their fellow exiles. Moving between present and memory, the film retraces her flight from Nazi Germany, political commitment, love, discovery of photography, and her transformation of the Leica into an instrument of struggle and freedom. Adapted from Helena Janeczek’s 2018 Strega Prize-winning novel, it portrays the first female photojournalist to die on the battlefield.
I'm looking forward to the film too. Recording the Spanish Civil war in the way they did was extremely fortuitous and timely - and it will be good to see cameras used as tools rather than as jewellery, and lenses capturing important images rather than obsessions about central sharpness or microcontrast.
It is also about time that the myth of Capa was filled in with the bravery and abilities of the daredevil Gerda Tardo - the other half of the Capa 'brand'.
It is also very interesting that the iconic "Fallen Soldier" photo was probably taken by Gerda Taro - not the male version of the Capa duo. That, according to Fernando Penco Valenzuela, a Spanish historian, archaeologist and archivist in the city of Córdoba who has spent years studying Capa’s work it was also probably taken on a 6x6 Reflex-Korelle and not a Leica, and even possibly staged, will also challenge some earlier assumptions.
