• Emanuele Crialese says he was born biologically a woman.
• He made the revelation as he introduced his film “L’Immensita” at the Venice Film Festival.
• The autobiographical film stars Penelope Cruz as a young woman growing up in an unhappy home.

Award-winning Italian filmmaker Emanuele Crialese disclosed on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival that he was born a woman as he introduced his intensely autobiographical film “L’Immensita,” starring Penelope Cruz.

The story of an Italian family growing up in Rome in the 1970s is the subject of “L’Immensita,” in which the mother, played by Cruz, and the father, who is violent and unfaithful, have strained ties because the oldest daughter identifies as a guy.

“It is inspired by my childhood and my own story,” said Crialese, whose last film, “Terraferma”, won the Special Jury Price at Venice in 2011.

“I was born biologically a woman, but that does not mean that I don’t have in me a huge part (that is a) female character. That is probably the best part of me,” he said, speaking publicly for the first time about his transition.

“At a certain point I had to make a choice … of whether to live or to die. You don’t choose to make that sort of journey. You are born that way,” he added.

While he avoided going into specifics of his transition, he did say that, like in his frequently moving film, he relied on his mother for support and understood the worry it caused her.

Cruz’s initially ebullient persona in the Italian-language film crumbles under the weight of her controlling husband and her difficult trio of kids, who all suffer the scars of growing up in an unhappy home.

Cruz, who took home the best actress prize at the Venice Film Festival last year for “Parallel Mothers,” claimed that her heroine is stuck in a predicament from which there is no way out.

“There are many women around the world trapped in their own homes, trying to pretend in front of their children that nothing is as bad as it looks. It is just (done) out of survival. I know some of them, terrible, horrible stories,” she told reporters.

“L’Immensita” is the latest in a long line of films where Cruz has played a mother, a role she said she had felt drawn to from a young age in her native Spain.

“(I had) a very strong maternal instinct since I was a five-year-old girl who was telling everybody in the park my plan was becoming a mother as soon as possible,” she said.

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