Adriana Monti

Adriana Monti (1951, Milan) began her career within the context of the feminist movement in Italy during the 1970s. Through her documentaries and fiction films, she developed a collaborative and experimental style that placed women at the center of her research, allowing them to play active and creative roles in her productions. Her work seeks to amplify the voices, thoughts, and concerns of diverse groups of women in their everyday lives, offering them a space for self-expression and making them the protagonists of her films.

In the 1980s, while completing the film Scuola senza fine (1983), Monti founded the experimental film school Laboratorio di Cinematografia – Albedo. She taught film history and production at both the Università delle Donne and the Milan Film and Television School. In 1996, she moved to Canada, where she worked for fifteen years as a television reporter and producer at OMNI Television – Rogers Media. She co-directed the documentary production company A&Z Media Ltd. With the support of a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, she directed the short film Iceworks, and later began developing Never Too Late to Create, a collaborative project with senior residents at a Toronto nursing home. Her films continue to be screened at festivals and institutions worldwide.

Collaborative projects

One of the first films Monti produced was Scuola senza fine (1983), which focuses on a group of housewives who took part in Italy’s 150 ore educational program. These state-sponsored adult education courses ran from 1974 to 1982 and were initially designed for female factory workers and farmers, later expanding to include retirees and housewives. As the name suggests, the courses lasted 150 hours.

Scuola senza fine is presented as a pedagogical and cinematic experiment—a collaboration between the students, their teacher, and Adriana Monti. The film explores the relationships that emerge among the women, the debates around how they are represented and how they wish to represent themselves, and the personal and collective insights that arise throughout the course. Monti filmed the project between 1979 and 1981 in collaboration with the group and their teacher, completing the final edit in 1983.

In 1986, Monti collaborated with other Italian feminists to produce Filo in catena (1986), a documentary about women working in textile factories. The film portrays their working conditions and daily routines, while also capturing their personal reflections, dreams, and the relationships that develop within the factory environment. It is both a document of labor and an intimate portrait of female solidarity and resilience.

In Scuola senza fine, Adriana Monti develops a collaborative filmmaking methodology influenced by feminist thought and critical pedagogy. The documentary emerges from the experience of a group of women who, after completing a 150-hour state-sponsored course for workers, decided to continue meeting to reflect on their identity, roles, and desire for knowledge. Guided by writer and educator Lea Melandri, these women transformed the educational space into a laboratory for self-analysis and collective writing.

Monti does not portray them from the outside; instead, she actively involves them in the creation of the film, sharing with them the writing, planning, and decisions about the narrative structure. One of the most innovative aspects of her approach is what could be called “conscious dramatization”: the women not only recount their experiences but also stage them and critically examine them in front of the camera.

Rather than a traditional observational documentary, Monti proposes a hybrid form that blurs the boundaries between life, theater, and thought. The protagonists perform scenes from their daily lives, read their own texts, and represent themselves from a new perspective. In this way, Scuola senza fine becomes a tool for collective self-discovery and a form of cinema that redistributes the power to narrate, challenging the hierarchies between director and protagonists, between academic knowledge and lived experience.