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At Bologna’s Specola Tower, 1932–1957, an optical technology was invented which would revolutionize astronomy. The tower’s four floors were perforated and a series of hexagonal mirrors was installed at its base, creating a giant telescope of 2×24 meters. A mobile camera was set at right angles to the mirrors and thousands of glass plates where exposed which offered a systematic overview of the city’s zenithal sky. Thirty years of research were necessary for the astronomer Guido Horn D’Arturo to invent the specchio a tasselli—also called multimirror or segmented mirror—an archetype of today’s most advanced telescopes. Horn D’Arturo’s photographic plates are now also full of spots and traces of deteriorated emulsions. This film is composed of scans and blow-ups of these plates.

Filming took place in the fall of 1962 in various locations in Barbagia, Sardinia, but above all in Oliena, where the entire carasau bread processing cycle was filmed.

When, at the age of fifty-five, Isabella Ducrot, whose real name was Antonia Mosca, decided to become a visual artist, no one, not even Ducrot herself, ever dreamed that today, at ninety, she would be the darling of art galleries the world over. The film Tenga duro signorina! Isabella Ducrot Unlimited follows her activity for two years, both her achievements internationally and her private sphere.

The story of the crew of the Odessa, a Ukrainian ship blocked in Italy because of the bankrupcy of its owners. For several years now they are stuck without a salary in a foreign land, taking care of the ship while it waits for a buyer.

The twilight scenery of the desolate Calabrian countryside leads into the meanders of a lost time in which every search is in vain: this frustration is paradoxically the lifeblood that manages to transform Gaetano Crivaro's film into a ruthless interrogation of ourselves.

In Gaza, members of a typical family are thrown into disarray after a series of bombing attacks destroyed their home, killed some of the occupants and left others seriously injured.

The femina accabadora was a woman who practiced an ancient form of euthanasia, a compassionate act towards the dying person, in order to alleviate her pains. Considered by many to be a legendary figure of the Sardinian tradition, in reality he acted until the 1960s, as our protagonists, eyewitnesses of the deeds of the ladies of the good death, tell. Together with them we cross the sunny landscapes of Sardinia and immerse ourselves in the shaded areas of a millenary culture still alive in the present.

This documentary portrait of a traveling circus family—populated with performing kids, dogs, and chickens—seems to situate us squarely in Fellini country. But Giarolo and Alice Rohrwacher are up to something far less obvious, tempering the film’s antic whimsy by capturing the dogged determination of the Solunas as they venture by overstuffed caravan from town square to town square, all the way to the Balkans.

The unpredictable nature of the sea governs the world of Sicilian fishermen as they work, rest, and seek refuge from a storm.

Bologna is a bizarre place. However, outside is barbarism. The old city is besieged by a new savannah. Homeless, nomads, tourists, dropouts are only the vanguard of a new citizenship. The ancestors of future kings. This film is a back portrait, an out-of-focus, night-time appearance. We will carefully avoid showing great monuments, famous people and facts of proven historical significance. Instead It’s a portrait that goes for minor fragments, anonymous citizens, intruders. Lies.

The final interview with journalist and writer Tiziano Terzani. Following his cancer diagnosis, Tiziano Terzani recounts his journey through conventional medicine, alternative medicine and, ultimately, within himself.

Perennially hungry for life, Ferdinando Scianna is now a gentleman in his eighties, with a vibrant mind full of incredible stories. He even has had a few brushes with death. Being let into his life means retracing an existence marked by encounters with some of the giants of twentieth-century culture, interwoven with friendships and questions about the meaning of photography as a practice, the significance that producing images can still have today.

Katelyn, a magnetic figure in American pop culture, travels across America in search of herself, embodying the country’s fertile schizophrenia.

Ophelia is 92 years old, and her foggy memories continue to fade. The only way to slow down the unstoppable action of time is to document the present and rediscover the past in old Super 8s.

What drives the small community of Frascaro, near Norcia, to remain tied to a land that never ceases to tremble? What moves its inhabitants to dig with their bare hands in the rubble of a church? A crucifix to be reassembled for the patronal procession, a canvas partly buried under the stones that preserve collective memory and signs of atavistic traditions, become emblems of resilience, proud belonging, defence of a culture that wants to stay alive, challenge to isolation after the earthquake. Not far away, in Campi, a group of restorers work to recover fragments of an invaluable artistic heritage, crumbled by the effects of an implacable nature. At the same time, in total isolation at an altitude of one thousand metres, a monk lives in harmony with God in respect of the ora et labora rule, tirelessly reinforcing his hermitage, not at all frightened by a land he has learned to love.

In the aftermath of the death of Marcella Di Folco, which took place in 2010, Simone Cangelosi, director of the film, embarks on a journey that takes him from Bologna to Rome, Marcella hometown, to start a search to discover people, places and memories able to return to him the complexity of the figure of his friend. A Noble Revolution aims to decipher the historical dimension of one of the most prominent personality of the Italian political movement for civil rights of the last forty years, Marcella Di Folco, leader of the MIT (Transsexual Identity Movement). The reconstruction of the film, however, does not want to be objective, but done through the filter of an intimate relationship, that one between the director himself and protagonist.

The activities of the Edison colonies in Cesenatico, Marina di Massa, and Suna. A few animated sequences and the narration of a child describing the images like a nursery rhyme characterize this documentary, which illustrates the company's activities outside the workplace. Beach games, puppet shows, and performances staged by children, aided by carefully chosen shots, narrate the colorful and carefree world of company-subsidized vacations.

A documentary recording the visit of the Italian navy warship Libia to San Francisco.

The Mancuso family has practiced transhumant grazing for generations, moving the herd of Podolica cattle from the Marcedusa countryside to the large Sila forests.

After their award winning documentary, 'Suddenly, Last Winter', Luca and Gustav are back. This time they have to decide: should they stay in Italy, or leave it, like so many of their friends have done already. Looking at some defining Italian icons, they go on a emotional trip on a old Fiat 500 through Italy, to look behind the cliches and to discover, what's left of the famous Italian way of life, confronting a glorious pas, a shaky present and an uncertain future.

The movie investigates the life of the last experts of one of the most ancient fishing practices: the trebuchet. The Trebuchet takes the form of a microcosm where everything happens and the characters reflect on the surviving of this practice.

Talking about the story of the Gaza genocide with other images and other words is possible. The discovery of some slides in a high school in Catania is the starting point for analyzing the origins of Israel's military occupation of Gaza by resorting to the etymology of the words used to describe what expressions like "terrorist" or "military occupation" mean, while the drawings of Amos, an Israeli child who portrays his imaginary friend Anya under the worried gaze of the babysitter May Golan, point out that most horror stories have deep roots in everyday life. Invention and black humor try to overcome the (denied) reality of an apartheid and a normalized genocide, exposed and simultaneously removed.

The making of Cabezas Cortadas.

The case of UFO sightings became a popular subject in the second half of the 1940s in the United States. From 1947 to the present, there have been more than 13,000 unidentified objects sighted in Italy alone. This documentary aims to be a reconstruction of the UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) phenomenon according to all its perspectives.

Davide is a thirty-year-old who lives in a town in the Sicilian hinterland. He doesn't know what free time is. He wakes up at dawn to open his bar and begins the hard work. He experiences body care as a cult: protein shakes, gym, supplements, pole dancing lessons and treatments from Alessandra, his beautician girlfriend. Davide has always wanted to please and be admired. From model to Mister Sicily, today his dream comes true on the stage of a nightclub where he works as a stripper and lets himself be desired by others. A documentary focused on obsession with beauty and the cult of the body without neglecting the equally current issue of the construction of identity starting from our body and the gaze of others.

It’s a model story, an extraordinary adventure, a tale of revolutionary practice and tension, among anarchy and irony, simplicity, curiosity and vitality throughout the whole of Europe, its wars and the social struggles of the 1900s. A tale on how to live all in one breath, responsibly, diving into contradictions, "getting one's hands dirty", and still keeping one's balance between theory and practice.˝

An exceptional documentary filmed in 1978 by Swedish directors Björn Blixt and Peter Englesson showing the behind-the-scenes of the film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) by Francesco Rosi.

On a hot summer day, a group of boys of the Roman suburbs play and laugh in one of the many rivers that surround the city. The camera scrutinizes them, approaches them, reveals the gestures and glances, wraps them in a sort of visual dance, while the words of the commentary (entrusted to the poetic sensibility of Pier Paolo Pasolini) narrate the stories, desires, dreams, the future.