Ginevra Francesconi, the actress Italian cinema keeps casting as a daughter

Ginevra Francesconi

Photo: Déluge / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 22, 2003 Sora, Italy
Occupation	Actress
Known for	My Name Is Vendetta, The Nest, Genitori vs Influencer
Awards	Nastro d'argento · Premio Kinéo

Count the fathers. Francesco Montanari, a widower who gave up his own music so that she could sing. Fabio Volo, a philosophy teacher appalled that she wants to become an influencer. Raoul Bova, at the head of a long-running family saga on Mediaset. Alessandro Gassmann, a former mafia enforcer who takes her on the run after old enemies wipe out the rest of the family. Stefano Accorsi, a widower whose girl kills the woman he has only just begun to love. Ginevra Francesconi has spent most of her screen career as somebody’s daughter, and what makes her worth watching is how seldom she has accepted that as a supporting part.

The pattern is partly the industry’s habit of rehiring the face it first met. She arrived young, off the children’s catwalk, with an open, watchful presence that directors kept placing beside an older man with something to hide. What changed is what she did with the casting. In Ivano De Matteo’s Una figlia, whose title means simply “a daughter”, she turned the part into an accusation and won a best actress prize for it. Now Francesco Bruni’s Il profilo dell’altra gives her a character whose most important bond is with another woman, and whose audience is counted in followers rather than family.

From Sora to The Nest

Sora, the town in the province of Frosinone where she was born on 22 April 2003, is a long way from a film set. She grew up there as the younger sister of Ludovica Francesconi, who would also become an actress, and between 2008 and 2014 she walked in children’s fashion shows. A short film, Non puoi nasconderti, came in 2014. Television found her before cinema did, in single episodes of Che Dio ci aiuti in 2017 and Don Matteo the following year.

Cinema arrived through a horror film. Roberto De Feo’s The Nest (2019), a gothic story set in an isolated villa where a boy is raised under his mother’s rules, cast her as Denise and earned her a revelation award at the RdC Awards. A year later she carried a film. Alessandro Grande’s Regina, the only Italian title in competition at the Torino Film Festival in 2020, put her opposite Montanari as a fifteen-year-old who dreams of singing and is raised by her widowed father until an accident changes both their lives. She had been fifteen at the auditions herself. She admitted to being “a bit afraid” of the part, she told the agency askanews, because she felt “an important responsibility”.

Michela Andreozzi’s comedy Genitori vs Influencer (2021) turned the same material inside out. Francesconi played Simone, the phone-absorbed daughter of a widowed teacher played by Volo, and on the Canale 5 talk show Verissimo that April she put the distance plainly: “I’m very shy, I don’t expose myself on social media.” The Nastri d’argento gave her the first Premio Graziella Bonacchi in 2021 for both films, at the same edition in which her sister received a separate prize for young actors. That summer she also finished secondary school at the scientific lyceum in Sora.

The daughter as an accusation

Television made her familiar at home. As Sole Borghi in Buongiorno, mamma!, the Canale 5 drama led by Bova, she was part of Italian prime time from 2021 to 2025. Netflix made her visible abroad. In Cosimo Gomez’s My Name Is Vendetta (2022) she is Sofia, a teenager who discovers that her father Santo, played by Gassmann, once belonged to the ‘Ndrangheta, and who flees with him to Milan. Reviews of that thriller, this magazine’s among them, found the plot familiar and the father-daughter pairing the reason to keep watching. Sky’s mystery series Un’estate fa (2023) placed her alongside Lino Guanciale and Claudia Pandolfi, and Nicola Conversa’s romance Un oggi alla volta (2024) paired her with the comedian Tommaso Cassissa, her partner since they met on that set.

There is a catch in that run of work, and it is easy to miss because the roles are large. The daughter part in Italian film and television is often a supporting role dressed as a lead. The story belongs to the father’s guilt and the father’s buried past, and the girl exists to set it moving. An actress can spend years in those parts without anyone noticing that she has rarely been given the last word. Francesconi’s early films do not escape the structure; Regina and My Name Is Vendetta both finally turn on what the man will do.

Una figlia is where the structure broke. De Matteo’s film, written with Valentina Ferlan from Ciro Noja’s novel Qualunque cosa accade, has Sofia kill Chiara, her widowed father’s new partner, in a fit of rage, then follows her into a juvenile prison while Pietro, played by Accorsi, tries to work out whether he can still be her father. The film refuses to explain her, and Accorsi said it “doesn’t give us answers”. Francesconi plays the silence rather than the remorse, which leaves the audience doing the father’s work. It opened in Italian cinemas in April 2025 after premiering at the Bif&st festival in Bari, and at the end of that summer, during the Venice festival, the Premio Kinéo named her best leading actress.

The same year brought Daniele Barbiero’s Squali, adapted from Giacomo Mazzariol’s novel, in which she plays Anna opposite Lorenzo Zurzolo and James Franco, and the RaiPlay series Tutta scena. In January 2026 Rai 1 began broadcasting Prima di noi, the adaptation of Giorgio Fontana’s multigenerational novel directed by Daniele Luchetti and Valia Santella, with Francesconi as Diana Sartori in its final three episodes.

Il profilo dell’altra, from Irene Graziosi’s novel and due in Italian cinemas this autumn through Vision Distribution, pairs her with Pilar Fogliati. Fogliati is Antonia, a thirty-year-old writer who stopped publishing after an acclaimed debut and now waits tables in Milan. Francesconi is Cecilia, an eighteen-year-old from a wealthy Milanese family with millions of followers and a severe, elegant grandmother supervising her rise. Five years after playing a girl who wanted to be an influencer, she plays one who already is. Conversa’s Tanto tornano tutti, which reunites her with Cassissa, is in post-production. The question Bruni’s film puts to her is the one her career has been circling for a decade: what she does when there is no father left in the frame.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Italian cinema, Alessandro Gassmann, Ginevra Francesconi, My Name Is Vendetta, Stefano Accorsi

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