In filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s world, a handbag is the best leading woman

A handbag is more than just an accessory. It’s a vessel of practicality, a shield that guards secrets, and, most importantly, it silently tells the world a little bit about you without you having to lift a finger. Maybe it also holds your lippie and wallet, too.

The wonders of a fab handbag never cease, as British filmmaker and screenwriter Joanna Hogg discovered while making her latest short. In her immersive film, Autobiografia di una Borsetta – which joins the Miu Miu Women’s Tales universe this week as its 29^th instalment (the programme supports auteurs) – an ageing Wander handbag is given a voice, quite literally, and narrates its own life. That got your attention, didn’t it? Now, hold onto your Miu Miu bag straps, because there’s more.

Set in Tuscany and narrated entirely in Italian, the film follows the journey of a Wander bag crafted from intricately braided white leather, adorned with Miu Miu’s signature gold hardware at its centre, and shaped with a gracefully convex handle. ​“I’ve always really liked what Mrs. Prada does and creates,” Joanna says on the eve of the film’s London screening. ​“Not just in the fashion world but in the art world, too. I was inspired to put an accessory at the centre of the story because of that interest that I already had in Miu Miu.”

Autobiografia di una Borsetta opens with a reflection from the handbag: ​“With the shaky memory I now have, I find myself looking back on the life I led and witnessed.” There’s even a birth clip, presented as a surreal hospital scene where sewing machines hum in the background, before you see its life journey begin.

The handbag’s first owner is a young girl who experiences life’s peaks and troughs, all with the bag in her clutches. Stolen, sold, forgotten, and rediscovered, the film showcases the many different owners who possess the bag and how they absorb the emotional weight of those who hold it close. ​“My own thoughts and feelings are the ones I understand most intimately,” Joanna explains. ​“Using the handbag as a character gave me a freedom to express ideas that might feel more constrained with a human protagonist.”

Eventually, it falls into the hands of a group of young friends walking through the Tuscan hills. There, confronted with its own obsolescence, the bag wrestles with existential dread, asking an unanswerable question: What lies beyond the life of an object?

Ahead of the Miu Miu Tales screening, we caught up with Joanna to discuss just how you find the right person to voice a handbag, her lifelong affair with Italy and what exactly is stashed inside the Wander bag in the film. Three guesses?

Hi, Joanna! Autobiografia di una Borsetta is the 29^th Miu Miu Women’s Tales commission. What inspired you to take on this project?

This commission came at a point when I was working on my next feature film and in a bit of a waiting game, which had been frustrating. Miu Miu sponsors Giornate degli Autori [an independent section of Venice festival where screenings take place], which is a bit like Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. During their programme at the festival, Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales shorts are also shown. At last year’s edition I was president of their competition jury and during the festival I was invited to create the 29^th Women’s Tales. I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

The film is told from the perspective of a handbag. How did you come up with the concept?

The commission was very open. The only [stipulation] was to include some clothing or accessories from Miu Miu’s SS25 collection in the film. It’s daunting to be able to do whatever you want within the parameters of a short film, so it took me a while to land on this story. But it was partly thanks to a friend, John David Rhodes, who is a professor at Cambridge and has co-written an upcoming book with Elena Gorfinkel called The Prop, [which helped me realise this]. The book centres around the importance of a prop in cinema. In fashion, the handbag is an important item in many people’s lives, so I decided to focus on that.

It’s not an easy feat to bring a sense of personality to a handbag. Where did you start?

The challenge was finding a voice to fit the words I had written. I wanted to find an elderly woman, who you could tell had [really] lived a life through her voice, because the bag is towards the end of its life. This ended up being a woman who lived in Italy, outside of the village where we shot the film. She was recommended by the local hairdresser, Lorenzo, and turned out to be wonderful to work with. She had a willingness to repeat line after line and never complained or got tired.

Why did you decide to set the film in Italy?

I have a love of Italy that goes back to when I was 13, when I first went there on a holiday with friends of my parents. It was the first time that I felt that I had freedom. I drank wine for the first time and I fell in love with the lifestyle. At 17, I went back with a friend and we met an American photographer who taught us to develop film and, more importantly, how to see. Instead of pointing a camera at the Duomo, she’d draw our attention to graffiti on a wall. One of my first photos was of faded handprints on a wall near Piazza San Marco.

Your feature films have grown increasingly autobiographical over time, from The Souvenir (2019), The Souvenir Part II (2021), to The Eternal Daughter (2022). Did making a film about a handbag allow for a different kind of self-exploration?

I’ve always been drawn to autobiography in my feature films, and there was something about the autobiography of an object – a handbag – that passively witnesses many things. The story became a vessel for my own thoughts and feelings. At the same time, I was fascinated by Mrs. Prada and her work – I wanted her spirit to be in the film in some way so I carried out indirect research from afar.

Your early film Caprice (1986) had a surreal, fantastical quality. Do you feel like you’ve flexed some of those creative muscles in your latest film?

Yes, I definitely did. I actively discussed it with Stéphane Collonge, my production designer. I remember talking to him about how this film, with its episodic structure, felt like a return to something I hadn’t explored since Caprice. It was my graduation film, and it got a strange reaction that made filmmaking feel less fun for a while. I’m in the fashion world again, or at least skirting it.

What items can we expect to find inside the Wander handbag in Autobiografia di una Borsetta?

Depending on the owner it could be a love letter, a souvenir from Paris, or a gun.