Cristina Mantis
Graduated from the International Theater School directed by Emmanuel Gallot Lavallée and from the Factory in Rome, she began her theatrical career at a very young age in the C.T.M. (Southern Theater Center). For years she dedicated herself to specializing in experimental theater and social commitment, in which she performed many theatrical pieces and gave voice to the most disparate female characters. Since 1995 she has posed as a model for Gino De Dominicis, the great artist of Transavantgarde and Conceptual Art, thanks to which she approached the dimension of figurative art. In 2000 she moved to the United States and to the Café La MaMa in New York where she played Hecate in the avant-garde show The Dream of the Phoenix, directed by Alexandros Hahalis. In 2002 on the occasion of Remembrance Day, with the show Euthanasia of a memory, she obtained the Silver Medal from the President of the Republic for Entertainment. In 2005 she began an important acting teaching collaboration with the Ateneo Theater of the University of Rome, creating the workshop “The character as a person”, a revisitation of the method. This long period of study then led to the staging of Infrarossi, on the occasion of the celebrations for the 700th anniversary of the La Sapienza University of Rome.
In the same year, at the same time as her activity as an actress, she continued her approach to film directing and intensified her activism for the respect of human rights, which saw her involved in the creation of many documentaries and video clips, often low budget production, acclaimed by critics and the press. In 2008 he made The Carnival of Dolores, a documentary on the underwater world of the homeless, which won the Tekfestival as best Italian documentary. In 2010 he made the documentary Magna Istria, a journey into the painful and controversial history of the Exodus. In 2015 he made the documentary film Redemption Song, on a migration theme, winning the Rai Cinema Award, which toured West Africa to raise awareness of migration for a year, thanks to the United Nations Africa Fund.
In 2019 he created the documentary IV Piano, shot inside the Rome Pavilion of the Poggioreale prison in Naples, the largest penitentiary in Europe. In 2021 she created the documentary Fertilia Istriana, a story of exemplary hospitality in Sardinian land of Istrian exiles after the Second World War. In 2024 he made the documentary film Kalavría, the story of a castaway, a contemporary Ulysses, who is reborn in the south of the world, which won the Naples Film Festival as best Italian film/documentary.