‘There’s Still Tomorrow’ goes to the Oscars. The titles will be announced on January 17th

Paola Cortellesi’s debut film is among the 207 feature films eligible to compete for the coveted prize.

To be admitted by the Academy to compete in this category, a film must have been playing in US theatres for at least 7 days in 2024. Academy members vote from Thursday to Sunday. The titles that will go to the 97th Star Night on March 2 will be announced on January 17th.

Set in Rome in 1946, the film follows the daily events of a working-class family made up of a wife, husband, two children and the husband’s elderly father, who is bedridden and needs to be cared for, which the entire management is on the shoulders of Delia (Cortellesi ): cooking, cleaning the house, looking after the father-in-law, taking care of the children is the woman’s responsibility, to which is added some occasional work to supplement her income, while her husband Ivano (Mastandrea), a violent and irascible man, it does not contribute in any way to family life.

The story is framed by a well-defined historical context, which is, in a way, a co-protagonist of the film: the Second World War has just ended, with its burden of suffering and deprivation, and it is the eve of the votes scheduled for 2 and 3 June 1946 in which Italians, and for the first time Italian women, were called to express their opinion on the form of government to be given to Italy and on the composition of the Constituent Assembly.

The scenes, all in black and white, and the settings in the working-class neighbourhoods of Rome are a clear homage to neorealism and its way of describing Italy immediately after the Second World War. However, the themes at the centre of the story have proven to be still very current: domestic violence, the disparity between men and women in family management and a profoundly patriarchal social and economic context in which women have a marginal, if not humiliating, role, perpetually forced to stay one step behind their husbands, called to comply with its will and to suffer its violence.