MARIA ZEF, set in the Italian Friuli region around Carnia and acted in the Friulian dialect, is the story of a peasant girl of fifteen, Mariute, who comes down from the Carnia mountains to the Friulian plains with her mother at the beginning of the summer. She and her younger sister Rosute (about nine years old) pull a cartful of wooden utensils in the hope of selling enough to survive the harsh winter. They live in a snow-covered hut. The father, who had emigrated to the U.S., is now dead. The mother never talks of her past, which was filled with hardships, and seems to contain some morbid secret. Exhausted, she dies on the trip. Mariute and Rosute eventually move in with their uncle Barbe Zef, their father's brother. They must share a single room in a small Alpine hut. The naive and exuberant girlishness of Mariute arouses the aging uncle who is frequently drunk from too much grappa or "gnappa" as it is called in Friuli dialect. (SOME SPOILERS AHEAD) When Rosute is admitted to a hospital for a foot infection, Barbe Zef, in a fit of drunkenness, rapes his niece Mariute. Afterwards, only now and then is Barbe Zef conscience-stricken. Rather, he feels himself to be the victim of his wrong doing and of fate. Mariute also discovers that her mother had been victim to the man's violence. Traumatized by these events and revelations, Mariute refuses the uncle's wishes that she be hired out as a servant in a friend's home and especially that the younger sister continue to live with Zef. She does not want the child to succumb to the same fate. She is willing to endure anything to protect the innocence of her sister. And so, in a tragic gesture of unshackled rebellion against her fate, she brings down an axe on the head of her fearful uncle in an act that is as strangely merciful as it is violent. The film's stark locations give it a haunting quality and suggest some aspects of Greek tragedy. The film was directed by Vittorio Cottafavi, more famous for his sword-and-sandal epics like HERCULES CONQUERS ATLANTIS. He once described the movie camera as "a merciless detector of the profound." It does that in this powerful film with great artistry. It is a movie that was made for regional Italian television and should be far better known. The 1936 novel it was based on, MARIA ZEF, by Paola Drigo, has been published in an excellent translation by Blossom Steinberg Kirschenbaum. An earlier film version of the novel was called CONDANNATA SENZA COLPA and appeared in 1953.
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