Italian

In 2017, 25 years after the Capaci and Via D’Amelio massacres, Franco Maresco decided to make a new film. To do so, he finds impetus in one of his recent works dedicated to Letizia Battaglia, an eighty-year-old photographer whose shots chronicled the mafia wars, defined by the New York Times as one of the “eleven women who have marked our time”. The director feels the need to pair Letizia with a figure from the other side of the fence: Ciccio Mira, the ‘legendary’ organiser of street parties, already the protagonist in 2014’s Belluscone. A Sicilian story.Read More »

Synopsis
Michelangelo Antonioni served as just one of three directors on this Dino de Laurentiis production that also corralled Franco Indovina (Antonioni’s assistant on three films) and Mauro Bolognini for three segments that all adhered to the titular theme, The Three Faces of a Woman: Il Provino, Latin Lover, and Famous Lovers. Il Provino (or Prefazione, The Preface), Antonioni’s contribution, stars a former member of Iranian royalty, Saroya; the entire film consists of her screen test. Indovina’s Latin Lover chronicles a professional woman’s experience with a male escort, hired by her business to keep her company on her travels to Rome. Finally, Bolognini’s Famous Lovers focuses on a woman whose marriage is threatened by an affair with a dashing young writer. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie GuideRead More »

Quote:
The Ashes of Pasolini is nothing more than a… selfportrait of Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is a documentary film, a collection of material that has been chosen and organized with philological acumen and historicalcritical rigor. It is strongly marked by a subjective, poetic flow and structure. It is a documentary film of poetry where the documents are not suppressed under the authoritarian voice over of the ‘Expert’ who guides and reduces everything into a reassuring hierarchical pyramid of explanations. The Ashes of Pasolini is thus Pasolini’s autobiographical narration of his own human and artistic adventure, the contradictory and irreducible complex lived out by the greatest Italian postwar poet under the impulse of the extreme Mayakovskian shout: ‘Professor, if you would take off your bicycleeyeglasses, I myself will tell you about the weather, and about myself’.Read More »

Susumu Hani’s six-year-old daughter Mio plays an orphaned Japanese girl who, for some reason, ends up in Sardinia. She starts going to school, quickly learns Italian, and befriends a boy named Raphael. One of Hani’s stranger concepts for a film, made enjoyable by the great naturalistic acting that’s found in most of his work.Read More »

Dr. Wendell Simpson is troubled surgeon with a nagging wife, named Carol, and stressful hospital job, who botches a surgery on an injured young man, named Johnny, who then dies under his care. The man’s dangerously disturbed girlfriend, Jessica, abducts the doctor and holds him captive at her apartment and subjects him to mind games and sexual torture because she holds the doctor responsible for the death of her boyfriend which triggers hidden repressed memories about Jessica and Johnny’s times together, while Dr. Simpson finds himself pervasively drawn to this strange young woman holding him captive.Read More »

Synopsis:
Gorgeous young French tourist Martine gets arrested while on vacation in Italy. After being found guilty of a trumped-up drug possession charge, Martine finds herself incarcerated at a hellish women’s penitentiary where the inmates are subjected to mental and physical torture by the staff and fellow felons alike. Things are compounded in severity when a riot breaks out in the prison.Read More »

A sizzling, erotic thriller about a triangle between a teenage boy, an older woman an her fiance, an imprisoned terrorist, set in a world of intrigue, betrayal and erotic pleasure, from which may be no escape.Read More »

Twenty-year-old Yuri lives with his elderly aunt in the rural countryside. At a birthday party he meets Agostino, a wandering children’s entertainer, who promises him the independence Yuri didn’t know he was striving for.Read More »

Synopsis: It’s the story of Stella, a young girl living with her father and two little sisters in an isolated house with bolted windows. Because of a solar explosion occurred years before, the man is the only one able to get out of the house. But his version of the truth seems to hide a huge lie.Read More »