(Cover) - EN Movies - Monica Bellucci says collaborating with a variety of directors enriches her work.
The 48-year-old Italian actress explained what she likes best about making movies.
The multi-talented star revealed the lengths she went to in order to pursue a wider range of acting opportunities not available to her in her home country of Italy.
"I'm so lucky I've had the chance to work with so many different directors," Monica gushed to UK magazine Stylist. "That's the richness of my work. I had to [leave] Italy and I’m happy that I did, because otherwise I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with different directors. In Italy, cinema is not like it used to be. We still have good directors and talented actors but the problem is money, we don’t have enough for art, opera, ballet or films."
Monica has previously starred in arthouse films such as L'Appartement as well as big blockbuster productions such as the Matrix Reloaded. The star learnt to speak Farsi for In her latest offering Rhino Season, which she shot this year with exiled Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi.
Rhino Season's plot follows the story of Kurdish-Iranian poet Sahel who has just been released from a 30-year prison sentence in Iran and embarks on a mission to find his wife who thinks he's been dead for 20 years.
Monica drew on her own personal experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society for the challenging role.
"I play an Iranian woman in the film Rhino Season, and people would ask me, 'How could you get into a culture that’s so far away from your own, because you’re a free woman?' And I reply that I come from a culture where until 50 or 60 years ago, a woman could get killed by her husband and he wouldn’t go to prison because it would be described as a crime of passion," Monica continued. "And I come from a country where until a few years ago, virginity was still an essential element of marriage. I can understand because I come from a macho culture. And I come from a country where women had to fight for their rights and are still fighting."
