Eva Ionesco has since become a filmmaker. Her 2011 short film “Je porte au cou la corde de ton pendu” (I Wear Your Hanged Man’s Rope Around My Neck) and her 2015 feature “Une jeunesse dorée” (A Golden Youth) explicitly dramatize her childhood: a girl named Rose (played by Agathe Schlencker) is posed by her monstrous mother (Isabelle Huppert) for erotic photographs. The film is not subtle. It is an act of excavation.
For nearly forty years, mother and daughter remained estranged, speaking only through lawyers. In 2012, Eva Ionesco took legal action against her mother, asking for the return of all negatives and damages for stolen childhood. Eva's lawyer asked, Eva Ionesco has since become a filmmaker
For decades, this pictorial has been footnoted, banned, debated, and finally reclaimed – by Eva herself – as a document of a specific, monstrous chapter of Italian cultural history. To revisit Playboy Italia (October 1976) is not to celebrate. It is to examine the moment when the counterculture, the cult of beauty, and the legal blind spots of 1970s Italy collided. It is an act of excavation