Rosario Pi


Rosario Pi was a Catalan film director, actress, and screenwriter. With the release of her 1936 film The Wildcat, she became one of Spain's first female directors; she also directed 1938's Molinas de Viento.

Biography

Rosario was born in Barcelona in 1899 into a family that owned a textile factory in Sabadell. She walked with a limp from a young age.
As a young woman, she forged a path for herself as an entrepreneur, starting her own lingerie business. When her business failed in 1929, she entered the fledgling film industry, forming a production company called Star Films. The first film she directed was 1936's El Gato Montes, an adaptation of the Manuel Penella Moreno's operetta of the same name. Sadly, after she directed 1938's windmills, her career as a filmmaker more or less ended with the start of the Spanish Civil War, at which point she was forced into exile in Italy.

Selected filmography