A house on a knife – edge

In a c minor trio, a viola d’amore, a cello and a violin are capable of grasping the unforseeable from life and still play with its possibilities.

Giovanni (Luigi Pistilli) a womanizer enamoured of life, Teo (Riccardo Cucciola) an old school chum and meticulous collection of watches, and Maria (Marina Vlady) a childhood sweetheart, always ready to help her fellow compatriots in Italy, inherit an apartment in Rome. After an arduous beginning, this casual cohabitation brings new energies to the lives of all three.  The sudden death of one of them puts the surviving two in a quandary: should they cancel this experience and go back to the dreariness of their destinies, or rather continue on the path they have embarked upon towards a future together? 

Planet Tonino

At my age I don’t like hardly anything about myself, or about others. I want the dirtiest, the wrongest, the most interrupted stuff. While we speak a camel is going by. There…I wish it were like that.
Tonino Guerra

Portrait of Tonino Guerra, one of the most prominent Italian screenwriters, author for world-famous directors such as: Fellini, Tarkovski, Antonioni, the Taviani brothers, Mikailkov. The documentary goes back through his career as a screenwriter and shows his everyday life at Pennabilli.  In this tiny village near Rimini, Tonino Guerra has succeeded in constructing a world in his image and likeness through the realization of a series of works-signs which express his indomitable vitality and creativity: fountains, road signs, “thinking” gardens. It is an encounter with a man who possesses an enormous vital force, with which he reconstructs his “fables” in order to defeat boredom and the predictability of everyday life

Saharawi

Songs and the testimony of the Saharawi people in the actuality of their exile.

For over thirty years the Saharawi people have been living in the Nigerian desert, struggling to be recognized and regain their land that had been appropriated by Morocco.Through traditional songs and images of life in the desert, the film gives voice to a people who, with dignity and determination, are only asking to exist and return to their homelands by the sea.

Earth wind

If ‘E Zezi didn’t exist, I’d go crazy.  The factory, the bar and the news on TG3: that’s my whole day.  When I sing with ‘E Zezi, I feel good. 
Miciariello, alias Sebastiano Ciccarelli

 

‘E Zezi, is a historic musical group from the Neapolitan hinterland, prevalently consisting of automobile workers from the Alfasud plant in Pomigliano d’Arco. Through their music – tarantellas, tammurriatas and fronnes – they describe their world and its transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial one. Theirs is a music that links the ancient to the new with incredible vitality. A powerful visceral music that has become a political instrument for social reform.

Vittoria’s tales

Death belongs to us and its concept must go back to the very core of life.

The film is divided into three episodes in which a struggle with death is represented in different ways. In the first episode, entitled Holes of Love (Pozzi d’amore), the protagonist Enzo Moscato recites a sort of theatrical monologue.  A long tale in which he speaks about the fear of an imminent death and the anguish related to the forthcoming separation from a beloved one. On the contrary, in the second episode, Upper Left Corner (In alto a sinistra) a young man meditates upon his father’s death.  He recalls how his father had suffered during his terminal illness and, precisely in the name of that reminiscence, he can finally overcome the lacerating pain that accompanied his solitude.
In the last episode, Vittoria’s Tales (Racconti di Vittoria), oncologist Vittoria  has contracted cancer, and from within the disease, she encourages her patients with great courage and dignity  to fight for their lives. The leitmotiv of the film, suffering and death, is viewed from three different perspectives: the theatre, literature and television. The aim of the film is to exorcize death with a myth in the first episode, to ritualize it in the second and finally in the last case, to contend with death by looking it straight in the face.

 

Matilda

Is Matilda a jinx? A black comedy with a surprise ending.

Is Matilda a jinx? After the mysterious accidental deaths of  three boyfriends, Matilda, who is eager to marry, runs a matrimonial ad in the papers, which is answered by dithering Torquato (Silvio Orlando), who cannot resist her charm. Ignoring the misfortunes of her previous boyfriends, he is headed towards a destiny that promises to be lethal. The film is a black comedy with a surprise ending.

It’s not fair

The adult world seen through the eyes of two eleven-year-olds.

Sofia and Valerio, aged 11 and 12, meet by chance in a semi-deserted Naples suffocating because of the summer heat. Both have been entrusted to the care of their fathers, a pair of forty-year-olds afflicted with every sort of sentimental and existential problems, while their mothers are far off, present only in brief telephonic incursions.  The two kids feel continually threatened by the instability and confusion of their families.  “It’s not fair…” they say as they join forces to face the adult world together with detachment and irony, so as to be no longer afraid of it.

 

O sole mio

The history and success of the song ‘O sole mio, a world famous classic.

A tale that peers behind the clichés of Naples, too often defined only as “sole-pizza-amore” (sun-pizza-love). Through the history of the song ‘O sole mio, from its birth in 1898 to its consecration, the film narrates the two faces of Naples: on the one hand the paradisiacal, luminous postcard-city, on the other hand, the dark mysterious Naples of the vicoli (the alleys). A kaleidoscope consisting of evidence ranging from the era of silent movies to our days, with the celebrated interpretations of Mario Del Monaco, Elvis Presley, Luciano Pavarotti, Sergio Bruni, and occasional performers such as Paul McCartney and the Spice Girls.

Maruzzella

The encounter of two solitudes: a transsexual and a young woman in a red-light cinema.

Maruzzella is a transvestite who haunts the corridors of red-light cinemas like a modern Phantom of the Opera, offering his clients very unusual sexual performances until he encounters a young woman, a desolate viewer of hard films, who will radically change the life of our protagonist.

 

Each Chair has its own Sound

I fell in love twenty-six times, I relapsed. As  many were the falls, so many were the poems.
Alda Merini

 

Alda Merini, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century confesses herself without inhibitions, recounting her life of suffering. This portrait alternates conversation with fragments of her poetry interpreted by Licia Maglietta (taken from her theatrical performance Love Delirium/Delirio amoroso).The encounter of these two women and their artistic fusion render for us the fragility and the greatness of a woman who had been overwhelmed by an excess of love.