Italy

Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, a middle-aged prostitute who attempts to extricate herself from her sordid past for the sake of her son. Filmed in the great tradition of Italian neorealism, Mamma Roma offers an unflinching look at the struggle for survival in postwar Italy, and highlights director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lifelong fascination with the marginalized and dispossessed. Though banned upon its release in Italy for obscenity, today Mamma Roma remains a classic, featuring a powerhouse performance by one of cinema’s greatest actresses and offering a glimpse at a country’s most controversial director in the process of finding his style.Read More »

A historical document on the uses of Architecture and urban reform as tools for political propaganda, populism and the co-optation of the masses.

The newsreels of the time are a testimony to it: the city is a gigantic construction yard; new buildings rise next to the demolitions in the heart of Rome and the Fascist regime adopts new architectural styles and transforms the city. The documentary La Roma di Mussolini, by Leonardo Tiberi and Leonardo Ciacci, aided by footage of the Istituto Luce and maps and drawings of the time, describes XX century Rome, a monumental city opposed to the ancient and medieval one. And yet Mussolini, and his ‘demolishing fury’ take on older city plans, started or laid out back in 1800s. Republican Italy indeed did the same with projects that have begun under the Fascist regime.Read More »

Quote:
Leave it to an old master to strip a complex question down to its basics, leave aside all the anxiety and handwringing, and discover compassion as a basic reflex, a core value of a Europe few seem to recall. Michael Sicinski for Cargo: “Ermanno Olmi’s The Cardboard Village stars Michael Lonsdale (fresh from his turn in Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men) as an elderly Italian priest in the final days before his retirement, watching as his church is deconsecrated, the pews pushed into a corner by a forklift, Christ deposed from the cross by a crane. In the night, the priest takes to the pulpit and addresses the absent congregation. ‘Where have you all gone?’ he asks? Unbeknownst to him, the town’s North African immigrants, hunted by the carabinieri, take up in the back storeroom. Eventually they build a tent city in the empty nave. The younger priest (Rutger Hauer) tries to convince the old man that it is too dangerous to harbor the refugees. ‘When charity is a risk,’ he says, ‘is precisely when it is necessary to offer charity.'”Read More »

Synopsis:
Roberto Rossellini’s first film is a work of deceptive transparency. In its initial moments the film appears to be a documentary about underwater, even deep-sea, species. But soon after, the narration, in the manner of Cocteau, unleashes a powerful “dual reality” onto the images, imbuing them not only with a narrative logic, but a kind of magic. Read More »

Synopsis:
The fates of an apparently random group of strangers who each come into contact with a mysterious figure who they believe possesses the power to grant any wish, in return for which they must carry out a task he assigns them. Read More »

A journey into the past and the future of Italo Disco music through the stories of the original 80’s heroes and cult DJs and the voice of the new generation of artists, radio broadcasters and fans ready to carry on the Italo Disco Legacy.

Featuring interviews with Fred Ventura, Rago & Farina, Flemming Dalum, Steen Gjerulff (Body Electric), The Hacker, DJ Hell, Alexander Robotnick, Scotch, Albert One, Ken Laszlo, Martinelli, P. Lion, Koto, Brian Ice, Fancy, Brand Image, Marcello Catalano, Linda Jo Rizzo, Italove, Surf Dancer, Roberto Turatti, Sandro Codazzi, Daniele Baldelli, Beppe Loda, Marcello D’Azzurro, I-F, Otto Kraanen (Bordello a Parigi), Intergalactic Gary, David Vunk, Alden Tyrell, DJ Overdose, Tero & Kristiina Männikkö, Gwen De Bats (Radio Stad Den Haag), Mark du Mosch, Black Devil Disco Club, Francisco, Lorenzo Cibrario (Red Gallery London).Read More »

Like Piccolo mondo antico, Malombra is a film set in a grandiose, but a bit crowded aristocratic house, which is itself squashed between the beautiful, but deadly see, and the stolid, un-romantic mountains. A claustrophobic space with no escapes, a space of directionless hauntings and self-induced psychosis. Also, of course, a space of late, musty fascism. The reality of the second world war and the twilight of the Mussollini era is never directly alluded to, but it seems to penetrate all walls, clothes, the flesh itself.Read More »

Synopsis:
Based on a Pirandello play, Vittori De Sica plays a wealthy young social lion who has to constantly fight off a horde of women who are eager to marry him because of his position and money. He weds Elisa Cegani, a servant girl, who turns out to be a more appealing wife than any of the others could have been. Assis Noris decorates the screen well as one of the chasers and pursuers. In 1937, De Sica and Noris made a film, “II Signor Max,” which, other than the setting and character role names, basically has the same plot as this film.Read More »

Synopsis:
Vittorio De Sica, heir to a large sum of money and owner of a newspaper vending stall, makes enough money out of his business to take a vacation at a fashionable resort. He is given a cruise ticket by an aristocrat who is an old school friend, and is mistaken for the aristocrat when he uses a camera that has his friends name on it. Assia Noris plays a maid who falls in love with him because of who he is and not who others think he is.

Remade as Il Conte Max with Alberto Sordi in the De Sica role and the latter as the uncle.Read More »