Francesca Bertin was born in Italy in 1985 and studied law in Trento until 2011. She eventually moved to Germany, where she began studying film at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HbK) in Hamburg. In 2013 she made her directorial debut with the experimental short documentary "I am here", which she co-wrote and directed with Karsten Krause. In 2014 she participated in the Professional Media Master Class in Halle (Saale). In the essayistic film works she realized during her studies Bertin dealt with the thematic complexes of identity, memory and space. In "Cadono Pietre" (DE/IT 2015, together with Karsten Krause) she observed an annual ritual in a small town in southern Italy; "Il Giardino" (DE/IT 2018) focused on street workers in the heat of the Italian summer who found a retreat in a garden. Bertoni's films have screened at numerous German and international festivals such as Munich DOK.fest, London Film Festival, and DOK Leipzig. In addition to her films, she also realized several video projects and loops that were shown in galleries.

In 2021 she graduated from HbK with the 23-minute "The Artifice" (2020). In it, she combined a vision of a utopian cityscape from the 1960s in Bergamo with present-day residents of the region. Together with Volker Sattel, in whose documentary "La Cupola" (2016) she had participated, Bertin realized the documentary feature "Tara" (DE/IT), an essayistic portrait of the Apulian industrial city Taranto and the river Tara, which is revered there as magical. It premiered in April 2022 at the Festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, Switzerland; its German theatrical release was in January 2023.

In addition to her artistic work, Francesca Bertin, who lives in Hamburg, is a member of the selection committee of the Documentary Film Week Hamburg. She is co-founder of the film collective Gorgofilm.