Anna Foglietta Steps Behind the Camera for ‘A Common Story,’ Starring Alba Rohrwacher and Guido Caprino
Italian actress Anna Foglietta makes her feature directorial debut with A Common Story, a domestic drama starring Alba Rohrwacher and Guido Caprino as a married couple navigating the silence that settles in after their only child leaves home. The film premiered at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, with True Colours handling international sales — the company that shops a film to distributors in territories outside its home market — having boarded the project ahead of those premieres, as Variety reported on 5 August 2026.
Rohrwacher plays Erika, a supermarket cashier approaching 45. Caprino is Mauro, a construction worker. Together they drive their daughter Irene — played by Ksenia Borzak — to college, and the departure cracks open a marriage in which neither partner can find the words for what they feel. Elio De Capitani plays Marcello, Mauro's father, who sells the family construction business; Caterina Casini plays Altea, Erika's mother. The screenplay is credited to Matteo Ferri, Foglietta herself, and Tania Pedroni, according to the film's IMDb listing. Andrea Benjamin Manenti serves as director of photography. All cast and crew details are confirmed in Variety's review published 9 September 2026.
Foglietta, best known to international audiences as an actress in Italian film and television, used the film's festival run to speak about a wider concern. In a Variety interview published 4 September 2026, she discussed gender imbalance at the Venice Film Festival — an issue that has shadowed the Lido's programming selections in recent years.
The festival marketplace is where a film like A Common Story finds its path to audiences beyond Italy. True Colours, a Rome-based sales outfit, took the title to Venice and Toronto with the job of selling it territory by territory to distributors who will then set local release dates. The Venice–Toronto corridor in late summer and early autumn is one of the two peak windows — alongside Cannes in May — for prestige titles seeking international buyers.
For Foglietta, the move to directing extends a career built in front of the camera into the decisions that shape what appears on it. For Rohrwacher, a fixture of Italian art-house cinema, the role of Erika adds another collaboration with a first-time director working from personal material. The film's premise — two people who have spent decades side by side and still cannot say what they mean — is the kind of intimate, chamber-scale story that the festival circuit exists to amplify.
