Italian

  • Elio Petri – Le Mani Sporche AKA Dirty Hands (1978)

    Elio Petri1971-1980ItalyPerformancePolitics

    Quote:
    Dirty Hands is a 1948 play written by Jean-Paul Sartre. Of all his plays this was the most discussed and opposed because of its political content, the problems raised, the instrumentalization of which it was the object. The story told, although transposed into a fictitious world, is inspired by the assassination of Leon Trotsky by his secretary Ramón Mercader, a Stalinist agent.Read More »

  • Marco Bellocchio & Silvano Agosti & Sandro Petraglia – Matti da slegare AKA Fit to be untied (1975)

    Silvano Agosti1971-1980DocumentaryItalyMarco BellocchioSandro Petraglia

    Three young people leave the psychiatric hospital to lead a “normal life” while working in the factory. They confide in their future prospects. In 1968, alarmed by the catastrophic state of public psychiatry in Italy, the communist municipality of Parma entrusted Mario Tommasini, a former gas worker, with the management of the mental health sector and its reorganization in a revolutionary fashion. This political initiative, inspired by Franco Basaglia, critic of the asylum institution and the origin of Psychiatry outside the walls, marked the beginning of a vast undertaking of social integration of patients.Read More »

  • Francesco Laudadio – La riffa AKA The Raffle (1991)

    1991-2000ComedyDramaFrancesco LaudadioItaly

    An incredibly beautiful young woman loses her husband and in order to pay off his debts, she decided to set-up a raffle in which she is the prize.Read More »

  • Sauro Scavolini – Amore e morte nel giardino degli dei AKA Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods (1972)

    1971-1980GialloItalyMysterySauro Scavolini

    Synopsis:
    German ornithologist rents old Villa, in which supposedly has many years no one lived. Walking around the neighborhood, he finds a crumpled foil. Purging them and after listening, he learns the terrible story of this house and its previous inhabitants. Now Professor, unwittingly becomes involved in the terrible events that resulted in a bloody denouement…Read More »

  • Valerio Zurlini – La Prima Notte di quiete AKA Le Professeur AKA Indian Summer (1972) (HD)

    Valerio Zurlini1971-1980ClassicsDramaItaly

    The three films directed by Valerio Zurlini at Titanus—Violent Summer, Girl with a Suitcase and Family Diary—were products of a fruitful collaboration interrupted by Titanus’ financial crisis of the mid-1960s. The Professor marked the reunion of director and studio after a decade in which Zurlini was only able to make two films. Here he returns to his trademark style: sober melodrama involving complex characters. The focus is on the title figure, a teacher—played by Alain Delon—who arrives for a temporary position in Rimini in the midst of a midlife crisis. Unable to face his depressive mistress, he spends his nights drinking and gambling as a mutual attraction develops between him and one of his students.Read More »

  • Nanni Moretti – La stanza del figlio AKA The Son’s Room (2001)

    Arthouse2001-2010DramaItalyNanni Moretti

    In Ancona, Giovanni is a therapist, whose 17-year-old son Andrea is accused of stealing a rare ammonite fossil from his school. Andrea is suspended and protests his innocence, but later confesses to his mother Paola he and his friend stole it as a prank, and intended to return it before it broke. Giovanni and Andrea make plans to go jogging together, but Giovanni is called to the distant home of a patient who is severely distressed about a possible cancer diagnosis. Instead, Andrea goes scuba diving with a friend and swims into an underwater cave, where he accidentally drowns. Giovanni, Paola and their daughter Irene are left to mourn. Giovanni investigates the diving equipment model and becomes suspicious that Andrea’s was defective, but Paola reminds him the verdict was that it was functioning properly. Giovanni, once a distant observer of his patients’ struggles, begins having difficulty analyzing them, particularly the one he went to see on the day Andrea died, against whom he shows signs of impatience and hostility.Read More »

  • Roberto Benigni – Tu mi turbi aka You Disturb me (1983)

    Roberto Benigni1981-1990ComedyItaly

    From New York Times:
    Four different comedy vignettes highlight the particular, idiosyncratic viewpoint of Roberto Benigni, a television comedian who originally wrote these four segments with Giuseppe Bertolucci for home TV. In the first sketch, the year is 5 A.D. and Benigni has to baby-sit for his old girlfriend Mary so she and her husband Joseph can have a night out. As Benigni is giving their child Jesus a bath, he muses philosophically about the nature of God and without a word, the little boy stands up on the bath water and leaves the outlines of his face on the bath towel. In the next segment, Benigni is in a quandary because his guardian angel, disillusioned with their relationship, has fallen in love with God and left him. Read More »

  • Glauber Rocha – Claro (1975)

    Glauber Rocha1971-1980ArthouseBrazilPolitics

    In the words of the director, a movie about ‘the colonizers in the view of the colonized’, the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.Read More »

  • Mario Soldati – La provinciale AKA The Wayward Wife (1953)

    Mario Soldati1951-1960DramaItaly

    Synopsis:
    Gemma, daughter of a lodger, is in love with her half-brother, but since she cannot marry him she ends up marrying a teacher. She doesn’t love him and betrays him but is blackmailed by a Romanian countess who forces her to become a prostitute. She’s desperate but in the end she asks her husband for help. She has learned to love him in the meantime.Read More »

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