Quest for a lost mother: Alina Marazzi’s Un’ora sola ti vorrei pietro roberto goisis

Alina Marazzi, the director of Un’ora sola ti vorrei (For One More Hour with You) who had already produced documentaries and acted as assistant director in a number of films, belongs to a Milanese family involved with books and publishing. Her grandfather, who died in 2003, was Ulrico Hoepli, proprietor of the publishing house of the same name and of the bookshop in the city centre in Milan which had been founded by his great-uncle. As well as being an able businessman in his own field, Ulrico had various passions, the most interesting and important of which, for the purpose of our story, was his love of the cinema. In the 1920s, through a business exchange, he apparently obtained one of the first cine-cameras. He then got hold of a Pathe Baby, with which he recorded the almost complete story of his family from 1926 until around 1980 on over 60 reels (all silent, of course, 8 and 16mm films).