Filibus
| Filibus | |
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| Directed by | Mario Roncoroni |
| Written by | Giovanni Bertinetti |
| Starring | Cristina Ruspoli |
| Cinematography | Luigi Fiorio |
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Production
company |
Corona Film
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Release date
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Running time
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79 minutes at 18fps |
| Country | Italy |
Filibus is an 1915 Italian silent adventure film directed by Mario Roncoroni and written by Giovanni Bertinetti. The film features Cristina Ruspoli as the title character, a mysterious sky pirate who makes daring heists with her technologically advanced airship. When an esteemed detective sets out on her trail, she begins an elaborate game of cat and mouse with him, slipping between various male and female identities to romance the detective's sister and stage a midnight theft of a pair of valuable diamonds.
Filibus was released by Corona Film, a short-lived Turin-based studio operating on relatively low budgets and obscure casts. Though Italian reviews at the time of its release were negative, Filibus has been well received by later writers and film historians, who have highlighted the film's pioneering use of lesbian attraction, genderfluidity, and science fiction motifs, as well as its creative adaptation of stylistic elements from contemporary popular fiction. The film has been screened at numerous film festivals, and prints of it survive in archives in the Netherlands and in Italy.
The elegant Baroness Troixmonde has a secret identity: a mysterious burglar known to the world only as Filibus. In the wake of a bank robbery, a large cash reward is offered to anyone who can track Filibus down, and the renowned Detective Hardy puts himself on the case. The Baroness visits the notary in charge of the cash reward, and enters her own name in the competition. Encountering Hardy in the notary's office, she hatches a plan to baffle him: she tells him that she knows he himself is Filibus. Leaving the office in her chauffeured motorcar, she catches sight of Hardy's sister, Leonora.
The Baroness rides to a deserted country road, where she uses a heliograph to signal for Filibus's airship. Her crew of silent masked assistants lower a capsule, allowing Filibus to reach the airship, change into her burglary outfit, and fly to Hardy's residence. Hardy is being visited by his friend, the antiques collector Leo Sandy, who is unrequitedly in love with Leonora. Filibus, seizing a moment when Hardy is alone, uses the capsule to reach him and put him to sleep with a narcotic. She takes a print of Hardy's hand, which she will use to make a specially formed glove.
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Wikipedia