A young woman finds the courage to confront the absences preserved within her memory, inhabiting an empty house suspended in time. In this place of loss, the trace of a presence still survives. Through the realm of dreams, she encounters a woman from her past, still alive in her pure essence. By allowing herself to be crossed by the pain of mourning, she returns to her life with renewed awareness. In a symbolic resurrection, she emerges from the cold, no longer alone.
Born and raised on the Tuscan coast, Margherita Bagnara developed a passion for cinema during high school, watching countless films to escape the boredom of provincial life. She worked as a photographer for a Rome-based film magazine for five years, and in 2021 she decided to combine her background in photography with her love for cinema by attending the Cinematography course at Shot Academy.
Since 2022, she has been working on film sets in the camera department, specializing in analog film. At the same time, she began writing her own screenplays and nurturing a passion for directing, aiming to tell her stories through the expressive power of images as her primary means of communication.
“Shards of Absence” stems from reflections on the complex feeling of losing a loved one who is still physically present but gradually fading away. In 2022 my grandmother, a central figure in my life, developed senile dementia. Little by little, the traits that had defined her personality disappeared, and although she was still there in front of me, something essential seemed to have vanished. This created a profound sense of absence that I experienced not only emotionally but also physically, as a sudden weight in my stomach that returned almost every day.
While thinking again about this feeling in 2025, I remembered a poem from one of my favorite collections, La tigre assenza by Cristina Campo. From there my mind began to wander, and I imagined an allegorical space representing the place in the mind where absence settles. I pictured it as a house that belongs to no one anymore, its furniture covered with white sheets, frozen in time. The only place still alive is the bed—the place where dreams can emerge. In the film, the protagonist lies down and falls asleep. In her dream she encounters the beloved figure she has lost, and the two begin a dance in which their gestures gradually merge. Through this encounter, absence becomes a space that can still contain life, memory, and transformation.
I drew inspiration from silent cinema and experimental films of the 1940s, seeking to create something surreal and slightly feverish, as if it were the record of a dream—like a dusty Super 8 reel forgotten in a drawer and rediscovered by chance. The direction aims to evoke a suspended sense of time, similar to the logic of dreams, where objects and details become symbols through which the unconscious communicates something about ourselves.
The original score was born from a series of improvisations created by the composers while watching the silent film, following its emotional flow. The music contributes to shaping an atmosphere of mystery and emotional intensity, helping to transform the viewing into a sensory experience.
The film was written, shot, developed at home, and edited during an intense creative burst. Created with a small crew of passionate and talented women, the project embraces a handcrafted approach: many stages were carried out manually on physical film, reconnecting with a cinematic practice that I believe is essential to keep alive, human, and pulsating.
Through the making of this film, I attempted to inhabit absence rather than escape it. In doing so, I found a way to transform the first great loss of my life into an image, and perhaps into a small gesture of reconciliation with it.
