Riccardo Schicchi and Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller formed Italy’s first porno studio and talent agency Diva Futura in 1980’s Rome with a goal of changing Italy’s conservative sexual morality. Schicchi’s Girl Friday, Debora Attanasio office manager and publicist, wrote about Diva Futura, her book, the foundation for this Italian film.
A fascinating recounting of Diva Futura in conservative Rome of the 1980’s and 90’s interlaced with questions of morality and artistic freedom. Schicchi (Pietro Castellitto) muses early in the film that his ideas were scandalous and immoral, but it put the agency on the front pages of Rome’s newspapers. Society condemns Diva Futura yet it is drawn to it.
The stories of Schicchi, Attanasio (Barbara Ronchi) and porn starlets Cicciolina (Lidija Kordic), Eva (Tesa Litvan) and Moana Pozzi (Denise Capezza) are an integral part of Diva Futura’s history.
The film pits morality and artistic freedom faced by Diva Futura and its starlets. Some of its unabashed challenges to Italian sexual mores could have been founded in the bullying of Schicchi in elementary school causing him to reject the attitudes of male virility and machoism and praise the attributes of womanly beauty.
Actressses wished to work for Schicchi for his artistic and erotic bent a far cry from the Hungarian porno factory (was it a former slaughterhouse?) portrayed near the film’s conclusion. Schicchi repeatedly morns the degradation of pornography as driven by internet amateurs making films with no vision, no art and controlling the masses without poetry. Porn has been degraded to the extent it gives life to the mental disorders of the worst male.” Was Schicchi’s pornography artistic with a modicum of morality?
Italian authorities target Schicchi’s operations with arrests, confiscation and prison sentences despite some Catholic priests being the best customers in his clubs hence made increasingly hypocritical by the Catholic church failing to conduct his funeral services.
Debora remarks Schicchi’s big mistake was to openly attempt to change Italy’s sexual morality instead of covertly.
Despite the efforts of Schicchi, his wife, Eva, notes she made the biggest mistake of her life becoming a porn actress. Food for thought. Even “artistic and poetic” pornography claims its victims.
Directed by Giulia Louise Steiger.
Digital North American release 11 November2025.
RKS 2025 Film Rating 88/100.
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