Italian

A documentary about Sicily and its peculiar customs, with an emphasis on religious rites and the clash of modernity versus traditional values.
At the end of the film, there’s a 6 minutes black and white interview with Rossellini.Read More »

In this heartwarming drama, the life of an Italian rice farmer involved in an unhappy marriage is chronicled. One day, he notices a familiar looking migrant in his field. Upon following the girl, he discovers that she is his illegitimate daughter. To quietly make up for his past indiscretion, he begins giving the girl many gifts, but he does not tell her who he is. Later the girl falls for an auto mechanic who gets jealous of her secret father’s attention to her. This causes the father to tell the mechanic the truth; the fix it man then decides to engineer a reunion. He then goes on to save the girl from getting raped by her father’s deadbeat nephew.

(Allmovie)Read More »

In the time of the Roman Empire’s waning, decadent, self-indulgent days, the Algerian-born Catholic convert Augustine was appointed Bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa. Seeing his own time, with its widespread poverty, greed and materialism, the Vietnam War, reflected in this fifth-century world, Roberto Rossellini turned his series of present-tense histories to the figure of Augustine, the splendid result being Agostino d’Ippona.Read More »

Plot Synopsis
Tragic story of a naive prostitute searching for true love in the seediest sections of Rome.

Nights of Cabiria Essay by Federico Fellini
The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my films, I have always been interested in the out-of-step. Curiously, it’s usually those who are either too smart or those who are too stupid who are left out. The difference is, the smart ones often isolate themselves, while the less intelligent ones are usually isolated by the others. In Nights of Cabiria, I explore the pride of one of those who has been excluded.Read More »

Synopsis
Erotic comedy classic 70’s where a Sicilian chaste and naive moving to Milan lost many of her inhibitions.

The Milanese truck driver Nino Bertini, who has run out of water in the radiator at a farm in Sicily where he is on a wine shipment, is attacked by Rosalia Ciubardi who has mistaken him for her fiancé Antonio. Discovered in the barn by Pino and Alfio, the girl’s brothers, Nino, under threat of a sawn-off shotgun, is forced to get married to make up for something that didn’t happen and returns to Milan with his bride.Read More »

‘Socrates’ Mirrors the Platonic Touch of Rossellini
Something more than wordplay is involved when one describes Roberto Rossellini’s “Socrates,” which opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater, as the great Italian director’s most Socratic film, in his most Platonic style.

Although the movie was shot entirely in Spain with lots of correctly costumed extras, who walk around what look to be the freshly painted, spruced-up remains of the sets of Anthony Mann’s unfortunate “Fall of the Roman Empire,” it concedes no more than it absolutely must to the demands of a popular cinema that seeks access to the intellect through visual grandeur and primal emotions.Read More »

In turn-of-the-twentieth-century Turin, an accident in a textile factory incites workers to stage a walkout. But it’s not until they receive unexpected aid from a traveling professor (Marcello Mastroianni) that they find their voice, unite, and stand up for themselves. This historical drama by Mario Monicelli, brimming with humor and honesty, is a beautiful and moving ode to the power of the people, and features engaging, naturalistic performances; cinematography by the great Giuseppe Rotunno; and a multilayered, Oscar-nominated screenplay by Monicelli, Agenore Incrocci, and Furio Scarpelli.Read More »

1860. Italy is divided in 8 states. But after 60 years of heroic wars, frontiers’ll soon fall, thanks to Giuseppe Garibaldi & the legendary volunteers who fought with him, known as the thousand.

cinepassion wrote:
The unification of Italy from Messina to Volturno, the past made flesh by Roberto Rossellini in a commemorative mood. Il Tricolore sways splendidly under the credits and then over a map of fragmented states circa 1860, a orchestral preamble concluding with a skirmish against an electric cobalt sky. Garibaldi (Renzo Ricci) is middle-aged, ginger-bearded, rheumatic, and utterly, serenely determined; before battle, he squats by the meadow to savor some local bread: “Anyone have any salt?” As the Redshirts charge uphill, the camera takes a paradoxically distant and urgent view of the clashing brigades and puffs of gunsmoke dotting the landscape — a study in long shots, a cosmic vantage.Read More »

Quote:
The real life of Tommaso Buscetta the so called “boss of the two worlds”, first mafia informant in Sicily 1980’s.Read More »