Filibus (1915)

Directed by

Mario Roncoroni

Genre

silent film, adventure film, LGBTQ-related film, science fiction film

Country

Kingdom of Italy

Runtime

1h 10m

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 25 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A mysterious sky pirate uses a high-tech airship to pull off daring heists. She pursues a detective and also romances his sister while disguising her identity.

playfulslywhimsicaldaringromanticlightheartedmischievous

What happens

Filibus is a 1915 Italian silent adventure film directed by Mario Roncoroni and written by the future science fiction author Giovanni Bertinetti (it). It features Valeria Creti (fr) as the title character, a mysterious sky pirate who makes daring heists with her technologically advanced airship. When an esteemed detective sets out on her trail, she begins an elaborate game of cat and mouse with him, slipping between various male and female identities to romance the detective's sister and stage a midnight theft of a pair of valuable diamonds. Filibus was produced by Corona Film, a short-lived Turin-based studio operating on relatively low budgets and obscure casts. Though Italian reviews at its release were negative, Filibus has been well received by later writers and film historians who have highlighted its pioneering use of lesbian attraction, genderfluidity, and science fiction motifs, and its creative adaptation of stylistic elements from contemporary popular fiction. It has been screened at numerous film festivals, and a nitrate print survives at the Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) with a dupe print held in Milan. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Cabiria (1914)
• La paura degli aeromobili nemici (1915)
• The Lady of the Camellias (1915)
• Father (1915)
• Il fauno (1917)
• The Mechanical Man (1921)
• The Extraordinary Adventures of Saturnino Farandola (1913)
• Stronger than Sherlock Holmes (1913)