Italy

Late fascist chickflick or early lib melo – hard to tell. Early production title was Vagine di ferro.Read More »

Paola is a young, beautiful woman married to a wealthy entrepreneur. She meets her former lover Guido after seven years, but their relationship is marked by tragic events.Read More »

Human not human is not only the best Italian “experimental” film of the 60’s, but also one of the richest and most involving documents of “cinema of protest”. – Lino Miccichè

Schifano’s cinema is, as his paintings, spontaneous and gesture-based, quickly objectifying the world, and at the same time deeply thougth-out, and progresses by building up pictures and sounds.
Dissolves and pulsing images of television broadcasts plunge us in a completely unstable state of vision, allowing the author to avoid choosing, including in the same space different visions and distant, fragmentary, expanded timeframes.
If anything, the choice is left to the viewer and, from this point of view, “Human not human” becomes almost an interactive film, one that needs to be mentally rebuilt.Read More »

Criterion Synopsis
Legendary French star Gérard Philipe swashbuckled his way into film history as the peasant soldier Fanfan in Christian-Jaque’s devil-may-care romantic action-comedy. In eighteenth-century France, Fanfan joins King Louis XV’s army to avoid a forced marriage to a local lass and gets himself into close scrapes and tight squeezes with Gina Lollobrigida’s impostor fortune-teller, Adeline, on his way to fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Filled to the brim with dazzling stunts and randy innuendo, Fanfan la Tulipe, which won the best director prize at Cannes and was a smash hit upon its initial release, remains one of France’s all-time most beloved films.Read More »

The film is built around Anna (Valeria Golino), a woman who has become so disconnected from life she can only see in grey. She works as a television show prompter, and is by all accounts pretty good at her job. She also has a comfortable existence and several children who love her. The same cannot be said for Anna’s husband Gigi (Massimiliano Gallo). An unscrupulous loan shark, he spends his days screaming abuse at her and their deaf-mute son Arturo (Edoardo Crò) before heading out to ruin the lives of the desperate.Read More »

Quote:
The great Italian comic filmmaker, Nanni Moretti turns his satirical eye on the nomination of a new Pope. When the man is chosen he freezes at the immense responsibilities throwing the Vatican, and all Catholics into a major crisis. A psychiatrist is called in to help the elected Pope overcome his nerves, but the anointed man has other ideas.Read More »

Alessandro Manzoni’s book I Promessi Sposi from 1823 seems to be one of the best kept secrets of the whole Italian literature. While by many considered to be the greatest novel ever written in the Italian language, it doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong reputation abroad. I first heard about it from an Italian friend during a long night of Totò films and beer some months ago, but when doing some googling after watching Camerini’s film during a train trip yesterday, I realized that I actually have a Norwegian translation myself, bought some years back when I spent most of my time going to book sales in Oslo and filling up my parents’ attic with everything I came across.Read More »

Quote:
Even if they were bringing the bodies of dead migrants ashore a few minutes from where you live, you’d still brew up coffee and cook dinner with the radio on. Your kids would still do their homework and get to school in the morning. Life would go on – not necessarily oblivious to the crisis unfolding on your doorstep, but existing at some remove from it. That’s the troubling situation revealed in documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s portrait of the current migrant crisis as visited upon the tiny island of Lampedusa, a little corner of Italy whose proximity to north Africa has made it the first European port of call for some 400,000 migrants in the past 20 years.Read More »

Porno & libertà is a film documentary about the generation who fought against puritanism and censorship to defend freedom of speech and sexual freedom. From Italy, Denmark and France through to California, the film follows a group of rebels who started a battle against censorship through pornography. Together they shook the church, the politics and the institutions. Through uncensored exclusive footage and archive material, the film explores the story and the fights of a group of pioneers: from film director and porn pioneer, Lasse Braun, to Riccardo Schicchi, master of transgression such as the election of porn star Cicciolina in the Italian Parliament. The documentary features numerous other protagonists such as feminist porn director Giuliana Gamba, author Lidia Ravera and a short animation by Charlie Hebdo’s veteran Siné. Through their utopia and shocking dreams, they made the world a freer place and paved the way for forward-thinking debates today, such as neo-feminism, or the LGBT rights movement.Read More »