Lucia is an 11-year-old girl, awake and curious about life. A rebel mortified by the bourgeois family environment of Southern Italy where she lives. The father is violent and the mother remains powerless in the face of her husband's anger. After yet another violence, Lucia gives a cry of alarm: on the day of her First Communion, she wears the white dress not to go to church, but on a rock. And throw yourself into the sea.
Lucia is an 11-year-old girl, awake and curious about life. A rebel mortified by the bourgeois family environment of Southern Italy where she lives. The father is violent and the mother remains powerless in the face of her husband's anger. After yet another violence, Lucia gives a cry of alarm: on the day of her First Communion, she wears the white dress not to go to church, but on a rock. And throw yourself into the sea.
Carlo and Elisa are a successful couple. He’s a university professor and writer facing a creative block; she’s a brilliant, sharp-witted journalist, known for her internationally published editorials. They live in Rome, moving between accomplishments and routine, affection and something that might be fading. In search of new energy, they travel to Morocco with their lifelong friends, Anna and Paolo, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Vittoria—bright, curious, a little eccentric. Tensions soon rise.
In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.
A middle-aged man, Pietro, becomes a widower and must take care of his daughter. He will never have the time to delve into his own pain, committing himself to raising his daughter with love and dedication, in an all-encompassing relationship in which one heals the other's wounds through his own. When, after a few years, he tries to start a new life with a new partner, not everything will go as hoped: his daughter's reaction will be exaggerated and Pietro will be put to the test. He will find himself struggling between anger and paternal instinct.
A young Roman woman during the 1950s is on the verge of becoming engaged to a man. She goes to Cinecittà to do an audition as an extra and is thrust into this almost infinite night during which she discovers herself.
At the end of World War II, shallow, self-centered Mara is the prettiest girl in her small Italian village; Bebo is a Communist partisan who is finding it difficult to adjust to the dull banalities of life in peacetime. When Mara’s father, a passionate Communist, declares that his daughter will marry the returning hero, her reactions range from joy to bitter resentment.
Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat, a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined.
A daughter seeks to restore the reputation of her disgraced father, a wronged college professor. With help of a professional student, she must overcome an ambitious sorority bitch and corrupt college dean.
A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.
Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.
When a rebellious teen embarks on a solo summer journey to connect with her roots, she finds herself in a new world, geared up for the ride of her life, and discovers she had the drive in her all along.