Italy

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Three stories, three portraits of Neapolitan women, three social environments (bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, proletariat).
Each story takes the name of the protagonist.
1) “Aurora”: a bourgeois woman, enriched by marriage, is abandoned by her husband; a former boyfriend comes back, but only to take her belongings.
2) “Carmela”: young man discovers, together, his homosexuality and the true identity of his mother, a father since always transvestite.
3) “Libera”: a newsdealer with an adulterous husband secretly films his carnal congresses and sells them in pornocassette.Read More »

Voice from cineuropa wrote:
Ferzan Ozpetek deploys a star cast in his dazzling film set in a dressmaker’s for film and theatre, where the fates of its female employees interweave while fulfilling an important orderRead More »

Pietro is a revered teacher, Teresa his brilliant and precocious student. Their affair is both illicit and tempestuous. After one fight, Teresa suggests that each tell the other a secret, one so shameful or shocking that were it to be made public, it would destroy that person’s life. Time passes, Pietro’s stature as a writer grows and his family settles into the comfort of a bourgeois life. But he is haunted by the possibility that Teresa may one day reappear and tear apart his world with the secret she knows.

2 wins, 5 nominations.Read More »

Trastevere, the historic district of Rome, is put into turmoil by a sensational news story: Leonardo Zulliani has disappeared. The case becomes a true national emergency, but who’s Leonardo? And what really happened?Read More »

Another case rather isolated in the background of Italian cinema during 60s is Paolo Spinola, who made the best debut as a director in 1964: “La fuga”, a movie which Spinola shot aged 35 after a long activity as assistant director and scriptwriter. It’s the first Italian movie explicitly and fully based on a psychoanalytic plot. “La fuga” (which is also the best script written by Sergio Amidei during 60s and the best acting performance by Giovanna Ralli, who won the Nastro d’Argento prize as the best leading actress of that year thanks to this movie) suggests an attentive and meticulous investigation of a neurosis suffered by Piera, a typical woman from the Italian affluent society, wife of a successful engineer and living a ménage seemingly with no worries.Read More »

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This stunning visual masterpiece is an exuberant testament to the resolve of women of the ’60s and ’70s sexual revolution and feminist movement in Italy. Acclaimed director Alina Marazzi takes viewers on gorgeous storytelling journey through archival footage, advertisements, and colorful images juxtaposed with the true-life struggles and first person narrations of three diverse Italian women: Anita, who is struggling with an oppressive father and the strict rules of her Catholic faith; Teresa, who must resort to a heartbreaking illicit abortion; and Valentina, a militant feminist caught between love and her commitment to the movement.Read More »

Set in a girls’ boarding school in Venice at the end of the 18th century, Gloria! tells the story of Teresa, a young visionary, who, together with a small group of extraordinary musicians, crosses the centuries and challenges the dusty catafalques of the Ancien Régime by inventing rebellious, light and modern music. Pop!

6 wins, 5 nominations.Read More »

Based on the best-selling book by Emmanuelle Carrere, “Limonov” depicts the adventures of non-conformist poet and provocateur Eduard Limonov, who grew up in what today is the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. He escaped from what was then the Soviet Union for the U.S., where he became a switchblade-waving punk poet, and also a butler to a Manhattan millionaire before turning into a fashion writer and literary sensation in Paris. After the fall of Communism, Limonov moved back to Russia, where he founded the nostalgic National Bolshevik Party, becoming an idol for many Russian youths.Read More »

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The “machine that kills bad people” turns out to be Cocteau’s death camera, freeze-frame and all, to Roberto Rossellini it’s “a comedy, my friends.” The distance between neorealism and surrealism is a short one, the seaside village displays wartime scars but not before it is erected as a cutout diorama by the big hand in the sky (cf. Lubitsch’s The Doll). The wizened wanderer who’s run over on the road is later seen at the religious procession, grinning at the fireworks; the shabby photographer (Gennaro Pisano) welcomes him into his shop and is rewarded with the power to petrify anyone to death with the click of a shutter. (The first to go is the bully, buried with his arm frozen in fascist salute.) Read More »