Twelfth HaFI-Resident: Giulia Di Maggio

(c) Giulia Di Maggio, still from the ongoing film project Two Mothers (Le due madri).

Following our open call at the beginning of the year, a jury comprising Francesca Bolognesi (Lucusta Association, representative for artist residencies at Villa Salis, Sète), Beatrice Gibson (English-French director from London, based in Palermo) and Clio Nicastro (HaFI) selected the Sicily-based documentary filmmaker Giulia Di Maggio as the next resident of our yearly Harun Farocki Residency. This residency is the third one organized in cooperation with Kultur Ensemble Palermo, the French-German Cultural Institute curated by Goethe-Institut Palermo and Institut français Palermo.

Giulia Di Maggio will begin her three-month residency in mid-August. During her time in Berlin, she will continue developing her film project, Two Mothers (Le due madri), a creative documentary exploring the nuances of maternal love through the themes of grief and the rediscovery of family history. Di Maggio grew up knowing that she had two maternal grandmothers, one from the city and one from the countryside. Her mother always told her that she was the daughter of two mothers who belonged to two different worlds and whom she could never really bring together. Over the course of seven years, the director is guided by the words of the three most important women in her life and creates an intimate exploration of love, the complexity of family ties, and the meaning of motherhood.

Biography

Giulia Di Maggio (Palermo, 1995) studied communication and performing arts at the University of Pisa and then completed a degree in documentary film directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Palermo. This led to the film Una Volta Ancora, which was selected for Visions du Réel and won numerous national and international awards. In 2023, she directed Le Fenne, a hybrid short film that won the Special Jury Prize at the Torino Film Festival.

In 2025, Di Maggio directed Night Blooms, an experimental short film created in collaboration with composer Giovanni Di Giandomenico. The film was produced by Archiv Aamod and is currently in distribution. Di Maggio is currently developing Le due madri, her first feature-length documentary, which was awarded the Premio Solinas and is being produced by Nefertiti Film.

August 6th, 2025 — 2025