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The Sky Is Falling

1943, an estate north of Firenze. The weight of the world is on the shoulders of Penny, who's about 10. An orphan, she must watch over her little sister when they go to live with her aunt and uncle. Penny's a Catholic, and worries about her uncle's soul. He's Jewish, progressive and a free thinker, a fair boss, and devoted to his family. He can be stern, so Penny also worries that she'll never please him and that he won't love her. Then, after the Allied forces land in Sicily and the Germans begin their retreat, Penny must worry about her uncle's life. She tries logic and appeals to human decency. Can a child keep the sky from falling?

The Sky Is Falling

5.3 2000
In Love and War

After being released from an Italian prison, British officer Eric Newby must find his way out of Italy before the Germans come. However, he is injured on the way and is left behind from his fellow soldiers. He is helped out by the local Italians, and he meets Wanda, a beautiful local girl who helps him learn Italian so he can escape. Slowly, their small friendship turns into a romance, but with the Germans looking for Eric, they are kept apart, not knowing what will happen.

In Love and War

7.2 2001
Primo Levi's Journey

In February, 1945, Primo Levi (1919-1987) and other Auschwitz survivors set off for home. The journey took more then eight months. Sixty years later, a film crew retraces Levi's steps. Levi's words, mainly from "The Truce" (1963), tell us what he experienced. In turn, we see Poland's hollow post-war factories, nationalism in the Ukraine, Soviet-style Communism in Belarus, the abandoned town of Prypiat (Chernobyl), poverty and emigration from Moldavia, Italian factories in Romania, and on across Hungary and Slovakia to Munich where Levi's rage found no listeners. Then home to Turin. An aged Mario Rigoni Stern remembers his friend. What has changed? Some issues of the war remain unsettled.

Primo Levi's Journey

5.9 2006
The Profession of Arms

In autumn of 1526, the Emperor, Charles V, sends his German landsknechts led by Georg von Frundsberg to march towards Rome. The inferior papal armies, commanded by Giovanni de'Medici, try to chase them in the midst of a harsh winter. Nevertheless, the Imperial armies manage to cross the rivers along their march and get cannons thanks to the maneuvers of its Lords. In a skirmish, Giovanni de'Medici is wounded in the leg by a falconet shot. The attempts to cure him fail and he dies. The Imperial armies assault Rome. The film is beautifully but unassumingly set, and shows the hard conditions in which war is waged and its lack of glory. It ends straightforwardly with the declaration made after the death of Giovanni de'Medici by the commanders of the armies in Europe of not using again fire weapons because of their cruelty.

The Profession of Arms

6.7 2001
Johnny the Partisan

After the 8th September 1943 north of Italy is occupied by Germans. Italian army collapsed and the soldiers are escaped to the mountains trying to set up a resistance. Many civilians did the same and Johnny, an English literature student, is among them. Johnny avoids to band together the red partisans (communists) and tries to be part of the azure bands (former regular soldiers). But in both cases he is deluded by the partisan bands and discovers that the partisan war is less poetic and genuine that he thought. At one point anyway the partisans free Alba from Germans. When the city falls again in German hands Johnny escape with Ettore and Pierre. But, one after another, German army and Italian fascists captures the partisans and Johnny will pass the winter alone and isolated. He then finds the way to participate to one of the last attack to occupants, in fact the war will be over two months later.

Johnny the Partisan

6.1 2000
A Life in Suitcases: A History of Tulse Luper

A comic study of 20th-century history, reconstructing the life of writer, creator and professional prisoner Tulse Luper. Born in 1911 Newport and last heard of in 1989, Luper’s life is pieced together from the evidence found in 92 suitcases scattered across the globe. A Life in Suitcases condenses the six-hour trilogy into a single two-hour feature, and in doing so, accentuates the project as a filmic essay in multiple narratives, listings, sidebars, footnotes, commentaries and anecdotes; a project for an Information Age ready to understand that there never is a phenomenon called History, there can only be Historians, gatekeepers to vested interests.

A Life in Suitcases: A History of Tulse Luper

5.8 2005
Oh! Man

After Prisoners of the war and On the Heights all is Peace, this film concludes Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi's trilogy on the first world war. From the emblem of totalitarianism to individual physical suffering, the directors use this representation of man's rampaging violence to draw up an anatomical inventory of the damaged body and examine the consequences of the conflict on children, from 1919 to 1921. From the deconstruction to the artificial reconstruction of the human body, they try to understand how humanity can forget itself and perpetuate these horrors.

Oh! Man

6.7 2004
Our Years

The Resistance, an ancient theme. Almost always approached from a realistic, if not documentary, perspective. Yet memory reworks in a fantastic, sometimes sinister, way all kinds of memories, even dramas. It is from this point of view that first-time director Daniele Gaglianone (34) approached the subject, despite his deep historical knowledge of the period (he has been working with the National Archive of the Resistance for years). In an interior, rather than intimate key: two old men meet by chance the fascist hierarch responsible for a terrible massacre, and they do not know whether to forgive or avenge. The past then mixes with the present, up to a third dimension that becomes a real character, in the finale: the decision made by the two will turn out to be unsuccessful and then, in order not to "die," the old men will build a perverse inner game capable of remedying every pain...

Our Years

7.2 2000
Ortona 1943: A Bloody Christmas

It was one of the bloodiest and most mysterious battles of the Second World War in Italy. In Ortona, a small seaside town in the Abruzzo region, Germans and Canadians literally fought street by street, house by house, even room by room. Why did everyone want to conquer Ortona in December 1943? What was so important about it? Why was it forgotten so quickly afterwards? And what secret does Ortona hide until this day? Amazing library footage, never before heard eyewitness accounts, documents that have remained secret until now, recently found German photographs and moving re-enactments help us to relive not only the political and military climate of the time, but take us back to the narrow alleys of the time, standing side-by-side with the soldiers to discover the embarrassing truth that has remained hidden for over half a century.

Ortona 1943: A Bloody Christmas

NR 2008
Back Home Tomorrow

Documentary about two children who have been directly affected by wars in their respective countries. Six-year-old Murtaza took a landmine home to play with and it blew up in his hand, a familiar story in Afghanistan where one child is killed or injured every day by unexploded munitions. Fifteen-year-old Yagoub suffers from rheumatic heart disease, which if left untreated is life-threatening. Refugees from Sudan's 20 years of unrest, his family are unable to pay for treatment at the local hospital, giving him little more than six months to live. This moving film follows the stories of these two resilient boys and the efforts of the remarkable Italian NGO Emergency to give them back their futures. (Storyville)

Back Home Tomorrow

NR 2008