Luca Rea’s new documentary tells a tale of mischief that may just have led to murder, and all set within the high-end art world.
The story begins in the Italian port city of Leghorn (Livorno) in 1984. The municipality was organising an exhibition to celebrate the centenary of Amedeo Modigliani’s birth, but the council decided to create a bit of buzz and scandal to guarantee the success of the event.
What could be better than to resurrect an old rumour, and hope that there’s some underlying truth in it? The ‘legend’ says that Modigliani, before leaving for Paris in 1909 to become an artist of world renown, threw some of his sculptures (reportedly, some female heads) into the canals of his hated hometown in 1909.
The rumour was spread once more and the canals were thoroughly surveyed in order to find these legendary heads. Four kids decide to make a prank and throw a homemade head into one of the canals. The next day, the fake head was found along with two more sculptures.
Everyone seems convinced about the authenticity of the three heads, including some reputed international art critics. But Jeanne Modigliani, the artist’s daughter and the controller of his legal archives in Paris, doesn’t believe that these are her father’s works and decides to go to Livorno in order to find out what’s behind all of this.
But Jeanne will never manage to reach Italy, because her corpse was found in her home in Paris. It was billed as a domestic accident, and her body was cremated. And the case was quickly closed.
“The Modigliani Affaire is an investigative documentary, a cold case that tells the incredibly story of a prank that got out of hand,” the Fandango team tells BDE.
The key members attached to the feature are writer-director Luca Rea (Django&Django), co-writer Flavio Nuccitelli, and producers Domenico Procacci and Laura Paolucci. “Even though this is a true story, it contains all the ingredients of a classical crime case worthy of Agatha Christie’s novels,” they say, adding how each character may be driven by a solid motive.
“Modigliani is one of the artists easier to forge, up to the point that the quantity of fake items has sometimes gone well beyond the number of his original works. Behind art forgery, there’s a business worth millions. And there’s even a larger business behind the forgery processes.”
“Being the only person in charge of Modigliani’s authenticity is a ‘monopoly’ of a priceless value. Jeanne Modigliani was the person who could determine alone the luck or the ruin of anyone who stumbled upon those heads and willing to certify them as authentic – both in terms of the exhibition’s outcome and a subsequent success within the art collectors’ market. For all of these reasons, after 40 years we still wonder whether her death has really been an accident or the perfect crime.”
The project, currently in early development and budgeted at €400,000, is seeking co-producers (in particular from France), broadcasters and commissioning editors from Italy and overseas.
“Many mysteries and thriller films revolve around art, such as The Best Offer, Nocturnal Animals and, of course, The Da Vinci Code, yet reality sometimes is more fascinating and unpredictable than any fictional narrative. This is why we love documentaries. Thanks to exclusive access to footage and contributors we finally get the chance to shine a new light on what really happened then and on the mechanics of the art business. Our goal is to create a powerful and compelling documentary that can premiere at A-list international doc festivals before global television and streaming distribution,” the team say.
Fandango, a major industry player behind fiction features and series hits such as Gomorra, The Lying Life of Adults and My Brilliant Friend, has ventured back to the production of documentaries over the last few years.
Speaking about the current status of the project, the team reveals they have already involved three of the four kids (now grown-up men) who managed to prank “the art collection system” – Michele Ghelarducci, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Pietro Luridiana – as well as Carlo Pepi, art historian and the most prominent expert on Modigliani’s oeuvre, who was on very good terms with his daughter Jeanne back then. “Thanks to Pepi, we gained access to Crespina’s mansion – once owned by the Modigliani family – where more than 20,000 works of art are kept.”
Fandango aims to deliver the feature by next year, when the 140th anniversary of Modigliani’s birth will be celebrated.
The director told Business Doc Europe: “The finding of the three heads attributed to Amedeo Modigliani – later billed as fake – has been stuck in my mind since July 1984, when all of this happened and I was just 13 years old. Although this has been something that had wide impact back then and the subsequent years, I’ve always found [it] disappointing and unexplainable that many would focus only on a prank made by the three boys from Leghorn.”
“Personally, it is one of the most complex mysteries of art history and, at the same time, a crystal-clear example of how a marvellous lie is always able to take over any kind of truth. This film aims to tell this story focusing on these two aspects: mystery and forgery, both in terms of the items themselves but also of the facts and the way they were told.”
