Silvano lives in Sottomarina, in the province of Venice. He is 40 years old, has a young, nice wife, a beautiful child and a comfortable house. For a living, he is a car thief. One late summer day, an old friend of his, Mario, who is back to the village after many years...
A reflection on the human being, on the human condition. The city of Tallinn, capital of Estonia, offers the rare possibility of observing freely, without tricks of the eye nor violence. People welcome the watching eye naturally, they do not feel offended nor do they withdraw, they participate willingly, discreetly. In every place: in bars, on streetcars, along the street. T...
Il dono follows the arid daily life in a village in Calabria which was once densily populate, but today deserted. An impertubable old man and a girl, who is believed to be possesed, seem to be simply waiting to be devoured by the time. The girl offers her body to the assaults of the passing drivers who give her a lift and know no tenderness. The old man finds a mobile phone ...
One day, when he was only a child, the director found in his grandparents' house an incomplete series of postcards with pictures of his family's village. These six postcards showed the events that took place in that small village, near the Spanish border, when the Republicans, escaping from the Francoist Spain, arrived to France at the end of Spanish war, in 1939. Twenty yea...
This documentary tells the story of a family. Everything revolves around the extraordinary Jewish woman Lisa Ghelfenbein, born in Odessa in 1887, who moved to Italy in the begin of the XX century to study medicine in Turin. She meets the man who will become her husband and moves to Bergamo, where she will raise a numerous family. During the period of the Italian Racial Laws,...
Interviews to different women who are asked to answer two questions: "What do you have in common with your mother? What does your mother have in common with you?" Women who tell about the deepest blood tie, the ancestral and biological bond.
The demolition of an old factory in the outskirts of Bergamo brings back to light the story of a workers' victory. In 1974, in the middle of an economic crisis, Lastex Yarn fired half of its workers. The factory is occupied and after months of protest, the workers show that the crisis is only a pretext to close and move the production lines to Malaysia, where the man pow...
"I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you", said Paul Cézanne. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze considered Cézanne Straub's teacher. Fifteen years after the extraordinary Cézanneìs death, the painter is the main subject of the movie in which he lives again through the words of the young poet Joachim Gasquet during a visit at Louvre. Jean-Marie Straub and Daniè...
The City of Silence is the psychiatric hospital of Treviso. Old abandoned structures, scraped walls, walled up windows. A nurse tells about the methods used in the past and the dramatic reactions of the patients. Some written patients' testimonies found in the hospital contribute to portrait the atmosphere of this place, where thousands of patients have lived.
A complex picture of the reality of the maximum-security prison in Volterra. The main characters are the long-term prisoners and the guards of the Tuscan jail. Everybody is originally from south Italy. Crimes, trials and verdicts that have changed their stories forever. The film shows the main characters while working on the preparation of a theatrical adaptation of Brecht's...
With a single long take the director tells an autobiographical story. In a bar, a young man is shot by a robber. The bullet breaks his femur and missed the artery by 3 mm. That man will start to work on his first film the following day.
Verona, 1970. Sergio is a nine-year-old only child. Though apparently well adjusted, he is nicknamed "the Lone Ranger" thanks to his solitary habits. His middle-class parents Anna and Paolo are going through a rough patch and unhappily debate whether to terminate Anna's unwanted pregnancy. During a long summer vacation in the country, the imaginative Sergio at first fiercely...
Flor da Baixa is an old pension with empty windows or an echo, a cross reference to an image, dreamt or seen by somebody else. Flor da Baixa is a woman who has been waiting and waited forever... is a border line, where everything has to be defined and can change.
During a scorching hot summer, a man prepares an erotic animated film. More than once, he gives a conspiratorial look at the camera that is filming him. A story develops, parallel to the story he is telling.
Bing, a Chinese girl, moves from China to Torino. Waiting for her, there is her new brother...
The relationship between Livorno and Piero Ciampi, a forgotten and disregarded artist, poet and songwriter who was always angry because anarchist and communist. The "Livorness" of the artist is told by the ones who have memory of his peculiar disenchanted irony which is perfectly summed up in one of his sentence: "I am the greatest, because I can get up to 300...
Mrs. Flo has to go back home, but it's night and she has to go through a street which has a bad reputation. Fear is not her only problem...
During the fight for the Liberation, the city of Piacenza counted 860 deaths and went through brutal massacres, but thanks to the Resistance, it obtained freedom. For this reason, in 1996, the city has been honored with the Golden Medal for Military Merit in the Resistance. The documentary follows the stages of the Liberation process through the voice of the ones who fought ...
It happens, sometimes, that a place finds you, even when you are not even looking for it, and you find out that you can't live without it. This is what must have happened to Elisa, the day when she was found by Sadurano. She got lost and she was wandering around following the road which, from Castrocaro Terme, climbs up the hills like a serpent, almost crawling.
Gardeners. Garbage collector. Assembler. Disparate stories meet at a social cooperative. The juxtaposition of events, which are only apparently not related, recreates gradually the complexity of a meeting place which is both physical and existential.
