THE COMMITEE

The National Committee for the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Elvira Notari was established with the aim of restoring the first woman director in Italian cinema, and her work, to their rightful central place.

The National Committee for the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the birth of Elvira Notari was established by decree of the Ministry of Culture on 28 March 2025, on the proposal of curator and film producer Antonella Di Nocera. Its task is to promote, plan, and curate the official events dedicated to one of the most extraordinary and forgotten figures of early cinema.

Born in Salerno on 10 February 1875, Elvira Coda Notari was the first woman director in Italian cinema. Beginning in 1906, together with her husband Nicola Notari, she founded Dora Film in Naples, an independent production company through which she made more than 60 feature films and hundreds of shorts and documentaries, many of which are now lost. Deeply rooted in the urban and popular reality of Naples, her work anticipates neorealism and stands out for its personal, free, and experimental vision, capable of telling the world with passion and truth.

Her cinema, built through location shooting, popular archetypes, and women firmly at its center, was censored by the Fascist regime, which sought to centralize the film industry in Rome and suppress the expressive vitality of cities such as Naples. Her sensual, realistic, and unconventional stories stood in contrast to the imagery imposed by regime propaganda.

Despite the ostracism she faced in Italy, Elvira was able to continue her work thanks to the distribution of her films in the United States, where they were enthusiastically received by Italian communities in Little Italy. She died in 1946 in Cava dei Tirreni, after withdrawing there with her family at the outbreak of the war.

The Committee, made up of scholars, lecturers, curators, and representatives of major Italian and international film and academic institutions, was created to enhance this extraordinary artistic, cultural, and civic heritage. It operates nationally and internationally, in the name of memory, vision, and cultural transformation, in dialogue with universities, cinematheques, archives, schools, local authorities, and research communities.

A collective commitment to rewrite history and restore Elvira Coda Notari to the place she deserves: among the great protagonists of twentieth-century cinema and among the founding figures of Italian audiovisual culture.

The elviranotari.it website

This website was created as the first point of reference for the National Committee for the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Elvira Notari. It is a home still under construction, gathering and piecing together the many fragments of an extraordinary career, some of which are still scattered today. It already brings together scholars, archives, and leading institutions committed to rediscovering and studying Elvira Notari’s work.

The celebrations for the 150th anniversary mark the beginning of a broad and lasting process of enhancement, study, and dissemination of her work, with the aim of giving stability and continuity to a body of work that still remains, in large part, to be explored, starting from the solid and surprising research that has contributed to her rediscovery.

The Committee, made up of academic and film institutions as well as distinguished scholars, to whom we owe the most precious work of preservation, study, and interpretation carried out so far, seeks not only to promote a programme of initiatives that will grow over time, but also to bring together and strengthen the actions undertaken both before and after its establishment.

The website is intended as an open place where cinephiles, researchers, enthusiasts, and new lines of inquiry can come together. A living archive, constantly expanding, that welcomes every contribution capable of deepening knowledge of this pioneering figure.

It is also a meeting point for all those who, in Italy and abroad, continue today to study, screen, and keep alive the cinema of Elvira Coda Notari. A place for documentation and exchange, open to scholarly contributions, testimonies, cultural projects, and new perspectives.

Anyone wishing to share materials, documents, or suggestions can write to the Elvira Notari 150 Committee 

comitato@elviranotari.it