Commentary on the film Elisa
by Leonardo Di Costanzo, 2025
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A film that offers several ideas worth revisiting is the one by Leonardo Di Costanzo, already the director of Ariaferma (2021), who here sets another story in a prison environment, albeit an unusual one – a rehabilitation facility in the Swiss mountains, a detention setting that is very open both in terms of its physical space and its overall approach. Based on an essay by two criminologists – Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali, who draw on the principles of restorative justice and “encounter criminology” – and inspired by a true story, the film follows Elisa, played by an intensely compelling Barbara Ronchi. She is a thirty-five-year-old woman who has been in prison for ten years, sentenced for the murder of her sister and the attempted murder of her mother – she set fire to both after strangling them. Elisa received a relatively light sentence of twenty years for her crimes, due to a diagnosis of diminished mental capacity, in which the symptom of “amnesia” and a malformation of the frontal lobe were considered mitigating circumstances. [...]
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