Discover Movies

Somewhat crazy semi-documentary by director Joe D'Amato is a strange series of Burlesque performances from around the globe. Actress and dancer Amanda Lear hosts these mostly musical numbers designed to get people on stage.

Produced for the 1972 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Lanscape, Supersurface was the first of five films planned by Superstudio as a "critical reappraisal of the possibility of life without objects." Superstudio envisioned a "network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabitable area". According to the artists, this network would bring about the destruction of objects as status symbols, the elimination of the city as an accumulation of formal structures of power, and the end of specialized and repetitive work as an alienating activity. "The logical consequence," they write, "will be a new, revolutionary society in which everyone should find the full development of his possibilities".

Emanuelle hosts this peculiar sexploitation Mondo film that looks at several examples of bizarre sexual behavior.

A documentary on the history of Italy's peplum genre.

Documentary on the filming of Novecento by Bernardo Bertolucci

Much-censored documentary encompassing thirty years of Italian politics under the governance of the Christian Democracy (DC), entirely composed of — occasionally dubbed — archival footage.

The film is a sort of presentation of Franco Fortini's book 'I Cani del Sinai'. Fortini, an Italian Jew, reads excerpts from the book about his alienation from Judaism and from the social relations around him, the rise of Fascism in Italy, the anti-Arab attitude of European culture. The images, mostly a series of Italian landscape shots, provide a backdrop that highlights the meaning of the text. - Fabrizio Sabidussi

On December 12th, 1969 a bomb went off at the Piazza Fontana in Milan that killed 16 people and injured 84. Railway worker and anarchist activist Giuseppe Pinelli was picked up, along with other anarchists, for questioning regarding the attack. He was held and interrogated for three days, longer than Italian law specified that people could be held without seeing a judge. Just before midnight on December 15, 1969 Pinelli was seen to fall to his death from a fourth floor window of the Milan police station. Although officially deemed a suicide, the reporter who watched the fall from the street maintained that he was pushed. Three police officers interrogating Pinelli were put under investigation in 1971 for murder but charges were dropped because of lack of evidence.

A documentary ostensibly about Anna, a young drug addict taken off the streets by one of the filmmakers. Through her they attempt to explore the social issues from their hippie perspective, instead they create a revealing, uncomfortable self-portrait and inadvertently raise questions about documentary film-making.

A journey through history

This documentary intends to contribute to the analysis of the drugs problem, by studying a huge district in a peripheral area of a large city: the Mirafiori South suburb of Turin, a vast ghetto where 15.000 people live in huge 9/10-storey buildings without any social services.

"A partire dal Dolce brings together "portraits-interventions" of a dozen or so thinkers, artists, friends of Gianfranco Baruchello (including extremely rare footage of Jean-François Lyotard), who comment on the concept of the "dolce" (gentle/soft/sweet)" Claudine Eizykman, Les Rendez-vous du Cinéma Expérimental, February 2000

Based on the montage of excerpts from the Luce newsreels, from the March on Rome to the entry into the war, with commentary by Giorgio Bassani, Fascista favors the "cut out and mystified, ridiculous, sinister" relationship between Mussolini and his cheering subjects, underlining the importance of the oratory style of the Duce in his relationship with the masses.

An account of Italian film director Luchino Visconti's travels in search for a young actor to portray the role of Tadzio in his 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice (1912).

Demonstrations of metalworkers, students, and their allies on the left, seen from the point of view of an increasingly disillusioned young leftist. Film produced for Nuova Sinistra.

A notorious mondo film depicting unbelievable and bizarre rituals, animal killing and cruelty, and people being killed and eaten, all by either animals or humans against each other or themselves.

This film is about tribes in Africa and South America who turn toward magic as a means of survival and way of life.

Documentary film making at its best as it narrates very exotic and esoteric rituals of the primitive peoples of Africa.

This documentary was distilled from a 3 1/2-hour television film Nessuno o Tutti, to make the point that many inmates now in mental hospitals could be released without harm to society, and to their advantage.

A sweeping documentary explores China through its people, showcasing life in Beijing's old city and a bustling cotton factory, a collective farm in Henan, the historic city of Suzhou, and the industrial port of Shanghai, culminating in a vibrant acrobatic performance.

The "stone in the mouth" is the scar that the mafia makes on betrayal's corpse. The modern mafia has the historical and sociological roots into the birth of the american capitalism at the time of Roosevelt. The American "Cosa Nostra" applies the similar methods as the sicilian mafia: same apparatus, same "omertà", same power and same terror. Giuseppe Ferrara, journalist and writer, uses fragments footage, film clips, and current news to make this film.

An instructive, yet full of adventure, nature feature documentary film that explains the life of sharks and their relationship with man.

Interspersed with interviews that the actress Sydne Rome gives to some of the most famous "Formula 1" champions - from Lauda to Regazzoni, from Andretti to Fittipaldi, from Villeneuve to Reutemann - the film shows some moments of the races on the most famous tracks of the world, and above all, the accidents that have caused it.

An attempted exposé of worldly violence using various scenes of graphic human and animal behaviors.

Mondo Movie dealing with various sexual aberrations and perversions. The sources of inspiration include Freud, De Sade and Richard von Kraft-Ebing.

A short about the film "I Am Self-Sufficient"

In a working-class neighborhood of Naples, a woman works as a sorceress and healer. Gianni spends a day with her, observing her work with poor clients, the sick, those suffering from love, and, of course, the superstitious.

A documentary about director Luca Ronconi. He is asked about his life and his choice to devote himself to theater and in particular, at that precise moment in his career, to undertake the production of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Calderon as part of the Prato theater workshop.

The film retraces the events of the Reggio Calabria revolt and reconstructs, with images of the protagonists and places, the atmosphere of those tragic days in the early 1970s.

A Castiglioni Brothers mondo film about the practices and rites of several native African tribes.

During his preparation for his film on Casanova Fellini asks a number of renowned actors to give him their view on the character of Casanova.

Joaquim Jorda's and Gianni Toti's short film

Documentary on the penetration of drugs in Milan in the 70s. Filomena is only 24 years old and recounts with a lucidity that takes her breath away her journey as a child locked up in boarding school, ran away from home, taken back by her family and treated as a lost woman. She talks about her marriage to a boy who emigrated to Germany, and her inability to adapt to this new situation. She narrates the arrival in Milan, the meeting with Antonio and the one with drugs. A dialogue for two voices traces the ruthless picture of drug addiction, the daily search for the dose and the attempts to get out of it. It is a poignant document, above all for the lucidity, measure, maturity and intelligence of two unforgettable figures.

Documentary about the Men's Volleyball World Championship 1978 in Italy, where the Italian team surprisingly entered the finale and won the silver medal.

"In continuo" uses slaughterhouse imagery to present the warlike nature of man, first depicting the cleaning and mechanical preparations for the slaughterhouse and then the killing, however, the animal slaughter itself isn’t shown.

"Gli angeli dalle mani bendate" a docu-film exploring fraud in the sport of boxing. The film was directed in 1975 by Oscar Brazzi and starred his brother Rossano Brazzi in the role of a journalist who boldly investigates the seedy underbelly of the boxing world.

Featuring the iconic italian filmmaker Federico Fellini and his wife, Giulietta Masina, this documentary explores his unique, dreamlike filmmaking process, highlighting his role as an artist shaping reality through spectacle, fantasy, and psychological depth, a style influencing many directors.

A tongue-in-cheek documentary that goes "behind the scenes" during the production of Federico Fellini's film "Amarcord" (1973).

A globetrotting travel all over earth looking for the absolute most intimately arousing and exciting towns.

Factory workers struggles over contracts in post-68 Italy documented through original footage.

Mondo-style documentary in which a movie crew travels to newly independent Papua New Guinea to capture the customs and culture of the cannibal natives. Prepare yourself for death rituals, war costumery, crude tattoos, animal killings, and cannibalism.

An interview with Antonioni about his film career, shot in 1978 by eminent film critic, film historian and founder of the Pesaro Film Festival, Lino Miccichè. Karlovy Vary IFF 2012

In the words of the director, a movie about 'the colonizers in the view of the colonized', the movie presents a series of disconnected happenings throughout Europe and Brazil emphasizing the perception of human life as trance-like experiences and thus offering a view of the human history as a connection of symbolic behavior.

An investigative film about characters who reject an existence in the world of consumerism and frenzied urbanization, seeking a new relationship with "different" communities and nature.

Documentary about the Velasco regime and the material conditions in Peru prior to the coup d'état in 1968, as well as the Peruvian left wing

An Italian mondo documentary about Finland. Among other things, it showcases intricacies of local mating culture, sports, Midsummer festivities and sauna.

An interview with the president of Chile conducted by Roberto Rossellini in 1971, but broadcast only after his death.

Documentary that collects interviews with various researchers at the Rice University in Houston, Texas.

A mock "diary" investigates rites and customs of African tribes.

After the author’s period of experimentation, these American notes are extremely straightforward. As in Migration, however, this America could be a more remote country, and the inspiration is avowedly Japanese (Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North). Implicitly, the film-maker compares himself to an old peddler of drawings, Sam, hawking his wares at the entrance of Columbia’s Butler Library.