The 2024 Italian film festival kicks off on Thursday with a glorious choice for opening night— a film called Gloria! – with the exclamation mark.

Music lovers music lovers will immediately pick up their ears, as it may suggest to them Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria, and you’ll hear it performed in a way you won’t forget.

When I catch up with Italian director, singer-songwriter-actor Margherita Vicario, for whom this is her debut film, I find that it’s a largely optimistic film, despite a grim opening.

It’s a feminist take on the hidden world of female musicians and composers in Baroque-era 18th century Venice, where young female orphans were taken into orphanages and trained rigorously as musicians for all-women ensembles, until Napoleon came to town and put an end to the practice.

Vicario’s film deconstructs that real-life story and takes us close up and personal to the girls who were all but enslaved.

There’s some surprising music in it when some of the girls, behind closed doors, seem to be performing jazz or pop.

The film, Vicario tells me, is intended to be hopeful and finishes on an upbeat note, suggesting a happy future for some of the thousands of unknown women composers and musicians whose names have faded into obscurity. She fantasies that it could have been otherwise.

And the Vivaldi connection?

Vivaldi, it turns out, was involved with just such an orphanage and many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children.

Vicario says she is certainly not suggesting that the mediocre chapel master Perlina in her film bears any resemblance to the great Italian composer, who was from a slightly earlier era than the film’s setting.

Briefly, Gloria! Turns the spotlight on Teresa, an abused Cinderella-like maid (with a back story) at the Sant’Ignazio Institute in Venice, where residents are musically trained by the untalented Perlina.

When a local craftsman gives the institute a modern pianoforte the girls’ lives are changed. Teresa finds the instrument and, clumsily, begins to explore the keys in jazz-like experiments, unlocking her own musical abilities and attracting the attention of the girls upstairs, who are preparing to perform for a visit by the new Pope.

The girls, and especially the most talented of them, Lucia, gather secretly, taking turns on the piano, and prepare to turn the visit upside down.

All this takes place against the increasing incursions into Italy by Napoleon, in whom some of the girls place great trust for the future.

After a screening in Italy, the film attracted the headline in Variety, “Upbeat Italian Convent Drama Gives 18th-Century Baroque Standards a Girl-Power Pop Makeover,” a reference to both the feminist fantasy elements and the fun, anachronistic music that has the girls bopping as they prepare for the Pope.

Vicario co-wrote the screenplay with Anita Rivaroli and also the original music with Davide Pavanello.

While she trained in professional theatre at the European Academy of Dramatic Art in Rome, she tells me, she is essentially a self-taught musician who started writing popular songs when she was studying.

“I’m not even that good, but I can play enough to write pop songs.”

The idea for making the movie came after her observation that there were so few women in music history.

“When I looked for composers, I never found women, so I was a little bit frustrated…I wondered how that is it possible that I could not name even one female composer in the classical music world.”

“I started to research female composers from the 15th of the 20th century and discovered a lot…the most interesting epoque was the 18th centur, Venice where there were institutions that took girls and raised them with music.”

The whole movie, she says, is about the creativity and challenges for these musicians.

The two central characters are Lucia and Teresa. Teresa cannot even play, but the moment she puts her fingers on the keyboard of the piano, there’s a note of genius, she explains.

“My movie is about creativity and fantasy,” Vicario says. “We know nothing about these girls but I wanted to convey something through their friendship.”

Visually and in costumes she captures the era, with the faces of the actors seemingly emerging out of the candlelight, as in a painting, but while largely they play the music of the century, she decided to make Teresa’s music like her own music.

“Everything she plays is my music. It’s extreme. It’s quite edgy,” she says.

“I tried to be as historical as I could. I wanted to say that we know nothing about these girls, but with the music, I could do what I liked.”

The finale, where the girls become travelling musicians is like a fable, Vicario says. The reality is that in history, they were out on the street.

The Italian Film Festival, Palace Electric Cinema, NewActon, September 19-October 16. Gloria! will screen 22 times during the season.