AUTOBIOGRAFIA DI UNA BORSETTA
A FILM BY JOANNA HOGG

The painterly clouds of a Tuscan sky hover above Maremma’s rolling landscape. On a rock sits a handbag. A white Miu Miu Wander bag. Upon close inspection, though, we see it’s dirty, beaten up, weathered with time. What has this handbag been through? And how did it end up here, alone? In Autobiografia di una Borsetta, we watch and listen to this handbag recount its life story, from birth to old age. It’s a life spanning a multitude of discrete socially encoded spaces — ultramodern factory, sprawling Italian villa, impoverished urban peripheries — and a spectrum of owners, from privileged teenage daughter to working class assassin. In this story, the Wander bag is the silent main character around which contemporary Italy teams with joy, sadness, desperation and desire. It is an object that is the heroine — not only of this film, but in many of our own lives.

AUTOBIOGRAFIA DI UNA BORSETTA, directed by the celebrated auteur of British cinema, Joanna Hogg, is the 29th commission from Miu Miu Women’s Tales. The acclaimed short-film series invites today’s most profound and original female directors to investigate vanity and femininity in the 21st century.

Joanna’s friend, the academic John David Rhodes, along with Elena Gorfinkel, have published a book called, The Prop, which asks, “what are film props? What do they do?” “It interested me to put an object in the foreground of the story,” explains Joanna, “and for people to be seen in the background.” This became the starting point for Autobiografia di una Borsetta. “I didn’t hesitate for a millisecond when I got the invite to do the 29th episode of Women’s Tales,” Joanna admits. “If I had to choose a brand I love, I would say Miu Miu, because of what Mrs. Prada has done over the course of her life. I always felt privileged to wear her clothes.” Risk always plays an important role in Joanna’s approach, and since she sees, “Miu Miu as a risk-taking brand,” Joanna decided to take up the project with a true sense of adventure. “It’s very rare to have the freedom that Women’s Tales gives a filmmaker. At first, I was intimidated by this freedom. Then I said to myself, I’m going to take up the challenge.”

What is radically different about Autobiografia di una Borsetta from every previous episode of Women’s Tales is the story’s original point of view. From the start, Joanna asked herself, “What is the visual perspective of the handbag? How does the handbag see? What if it sees the world like an insect.” This led her to use a very wide lens to show what the handbag witnesses. “It has an objective view of its life.” The use of four iPhones 16 gives Joanna a creative agility, which is reflected in the film’s story, as it cuts a cross section through society — rich to poor, legal to criminal — with all the roles played by a non-actor cast.

Maremma’s breathtaking sceneries are another background-to-foreground character. And, while the handbag is mute, “it has a voice,” and we find ourselves, strangely, developing empathy for it. In a cinematic language that fuses naturalism with magic surrealism, Autobiografia di una Borsetta shows what it means to be happy, to suffer misery, to be in love. As it moves from owner to owner, the Miu Miu bag learns what it means to be alive. As Joanna suspects, “handbags don’t die; they’re kind of immortal.”

Considered one of the UK’s leading auteurs, Joanna Hogg was a photographer and television director, before making her feature film debut with Unrelated (2008). Winning many awards including the FIPRESCI Prize at The London Film Festival, she went on to make Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013). Her next film, The Souvenir (2019) had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Award. Hogg’s follow-up, The Souvenir Part II (2021) premiered in the Quinzaine at the Festival de Cannes. She followed this with The Eternal Daughter (2022), starring frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, which premiered in competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival.

Joanna Hogg’s new episode for Women’s Tales will be premiered at Curzon Mayfair Cinema, London on February 13th 2025, followed by a conversation with the director. The short is afterwards available on Miu Miu digital channels. AUTOBIOGRAFIA DI UNA BORSETTA will be available to stream on MUBI globally from February 23rd , 2025.