Bitter Years

Bitter Years retraces the life of Mario Mieli, among the founders of the Italian Homosexual Liberation Movement, created at the beginning of the Seventies. Born in 1952 in Milan, Mario killed himself in 1983, before he was 31. He was an activist, an intellectual, a writer and a performer: a key figure in the Italian cultural panorama at that time, together with his friends architect Corrado Levi, painter Piero Fassoni singer Ivan Cattaneo, activist Angelo Pezzana, writer Fernanda Pivano and poet Milo De Angelis. He liked to provoke and to be an innovator but, today, his thought has been completely forgotten. A son of the upper-middle class and second-last of seven children, he spent an entire life having a complicate relationship with his parents, Water and Liderica and the last years of his life together with his love Umberto Pasti, in a very difficult and intense love story. Bitter Years are the years a young boy spent, with his alien sweetness, to make his life unique. His name was Mario, or, if you prefer, Maria.

Andrea Adriatico (L’Aquila, 1968) is one of the most relevant theatre directors from his generation (90’s) and a film director, a journalist, an architect, and a professor of film theory at the Bologna University D.A.M.S. In 1993, he founded the international center Teatri di Vita. Between the 2000 and 2002 he directed three short films: Anarchie, L’auto del silenzio and Pugni e su di me si chiude un cielo, premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In 2004, his first feature film, The Wind, in the Evening was premiered at the Berlinale and in 2007, his second feature Andres and Me was preferred at the London BFI Film Festival. In 2010, he directed, together with Giulio Maria Corbelli, the documentary +o- Il sesso confuso, racconti di mondi nell’era dell’AIDS, trying to make a point of situation on the pandemic who has overwhelmed our century. His last documentary has been directed in 2015 and is entitled Torri, checche e tortellini. In 2019, he premiered the feature film Bitter Years at the Rome Film Festival, bringing to the big screen the story of the gay activist Mario Mieli.