Two upcoming screenings in the United States — July 10 at Manhattan’s Roxy Cinema and July 30 at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center — will spotlight one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Italian art. Hold Tight Missy! Isabella Ducrot Unlimited, the international title of Tenga duro signorina!, directed by Monica Stambrini, is not just a portrait of an artist; it’s a compelling reflection on reinvention, on earning recognition without chasing it, and on finding joy where society no longer expects it.
Isabella Ducrot began making art at 55. Today, in her nineties, she is represented by leading galleries across Europe — from Sadie Coles HQ in London to Petzel Gallery in New York — and her textile-based works have appeared at Art Basel and even in a recent Dior haute couture show. But the film is less interested in tracking accolades than it is in tracing gesture, thought, and material: the artist’s way of moving through paper and cloth, of thinking with her hands, of living inside her work.
“A happy life begins at 60,” Ducrot says in the film, and Stambrini — who followed her subject for two years, camera in hand — believes her. “I started filming alone, with no safety net,” the director explains. “Sometimes I was just an invisible observer; other times, I was a companion on the road. What struck me was not just Isabella’s late success, but the way she receives it — always with a sense of disbelief, almost as if it were beside the point.”
The documentary moves through Ducrot’s home studio in Rome, her travels, her meetings with curators and gallery directors, but never strays far from the intimate. Her husband Vicky, who recently passed away, is a quiet but constant presence. So is her sense of humor, the voice with which she recalls her childhood in Naples, her fragile health, her early years of uncertainty and self-doubt. What emerges is not a linear biography but a meditation on time — lived time, waited-for time, and time turned into matter.
“There’s nothing strange about being a woman and an artist at 90,” Stambrini notes. “It’s a political act.” In a cultural climate obsessed with youth, Hold Tight Missy! offers a sharp reversal: maturity not as decline, but as momentum. An age not to be hidden, but to be inhabited.
Produced by Eolo Film Productions and distributed by Lucky Red, the film premiered at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori and now reaches New York in its subtitled version, with two special screenings that offer a rare look into the work of a woman who has transformed time into a space for creation — and age into a new way of being in the world.
