Discoveries from Italy World Cinema

A young female Japanese hacker returns to Tokyo for a short visit and is quickly caught up in a web of crime and violence by the city's most notorious hikikomori psychopath.

Freely taken from the novel "Misunderstood" by Florence Montgomery, "Incompreso" takes place in the second half of the 1950s in Lucca: Edoardo Quaratesi, an important producer of fine wines, while loving his wife Elisa and his two children, Francesco and Mino, is mainly dedicated to his work. To suffer the most from the absence of Edoardo is the firstborn, Francesco, who pours all his unsatisfied need for love on his mother and little brother. After Elisa's death due to a serious illness, the situation at the Quaratesi home gets complicated, until we reach a dramatic epilogue.

A man becomes a werewolf after being cursed by a black magic society. Only a jeweled necklace he wears can stop the transformations taking place.

This short film is a multispecies ethnographic collaboration between humans and donkeys, in the permacultural site of Centre Thar dö Ling, in the Valley of Sagana (Sicily, Italy), where the land is being regenerated, and regenerative, through more-than-human ecological interactions. Land is shaped as land shapes.

On Christmas Eve, a curious child embarks on a hilarious adventure with a man he believes to be Santa Claus — but is actually an undercover thief.

Late at night, Angelo returns from a mission in Africa and slips behind the wheel of a taxi, navigating a city he barely recognizes. Shrouded in darkness, its streets pulse with a strange, unsettling energy. But the true nightmare begins when he finally reaches home. Confronted by sudden eruptions of senseless violence and drawn into a web of increasingly twisted personal entanglements, Angelo is forced down a harrowing path. As he ventures ever deeper into the abyss of the night, he finds himself changed in ways he never could have imagined.

The Governor of Kansas hires six gunfighters to overthrow the tyrannical rule of the self-appointed sheriff of Abilene.

The story of a teenager whose biggest dream is to marry Simon Le Bon, singer of pop band Duran Duran.

“Omen, a dark and timeless traveler, emerges from the belly of a gutted sheep and finds himself in an unknown void. In this tormented space, a disturbing encounter awaits him: an Enchantress. Through silent revelations and hidden omens, a haunting and supernatural journey begins, in search of meaning beyond appearances.”

Three stories are intertwined in a land, Friuli, in the North-East of Italy, which extends along a triple border. The stories of Irene, a Carnian, Christian girl; Pavel, Ukrainian and Jewish; Mehdi, Iranian and Muslim. Udine. A beautiful city, but one that is perceived as cold and inhospitable by emigrants. Pavel and Mehdi are illegal immigrants, who share an apartment - and concerns about social matters - in the “ghetto” of Via Roma. In love with Pavel, Irene tries to help them, but her surge of solidarity goes perhaps too far, and she regrets it. Mehdi lives obsessed with an ancient guilt: his fragile soul is attracted to Evil. Predestination and moral choice. Two alternatives? Subjection to freedom of Good or Evil. What will the protagonists choose?

Casale Monferrato, 2011. The town is excited because of the impending verdict of the trial against Eternit, the factory which produced asbestos: the company's managers are in the dock, responding to the harmful effects which have been proved with thousand of deaths. One of the employees who got sick for asbestos is Eduardo: he has been working in the plant for a life and now he is gravely ill. He has little time to repair the relationship with his son Luca, ruined during the past years. And Luca, also thanks to the love for his girlfriend Raffaella, is ready to reconcile.

Drama set in the nineteenth century in Sorrento in southern Italy. It is an adaptation of the 1852 novel of the same title by Francesco Mastriani. A young woman named Beatrice loses her sight after witnessing the death of her mother. Unable to see Beatrice is unable to identify her mothers’ killer. The police arrest a man who they believe is the murderer. Did they get the right man or is the killer still lurking in the shadows? Years later a family friend introduces Beatrice to a renowned Doctor who specializes in restoring sight. Will Beatrice regain her sight and identify her mothers’ killer or will someone make sure that she never sees again?

Based on H P Lovecraft's tale, "The Shunned House," presents the stories of three people who all died within the confines of the dark and isolated chateau. Each story is taken from a different period in time, yet they combine with one another to reveal the house's dark past to a journalist specialising in the paranormal and his sceptic girlfriend.

Set in 1960, the year of the Rome Olympics, a 13 year-old boy with aspirations to become an athlete befriends an ageing, disabled bus driver who understands his ambitions.

Life and Death of Oriana Fallaci: the greatest Italian journalist of all time who made men of power tremble with her interviews and her sharp writing.

In suburban Rome, a kid is intrigued by a mannequin abandoned in a field. The fascination for this lifeless body, will mark the discovery of a new world, made of impulses, dreams and desires.

In Naples, during World War II, Amalia Jovine, in order to survive, smuggles food and coffee in her crowded and dilapidated basement, in partnership with Settebellizze. Her husband Gennaro disapproves, but does not prevent Amalia from continuing her trafficking...

Frida gets married, but is very busy with her job as an engineer, and doesn't have time for her new husband. He then runs away with the flower girl which causes Frida to lose it.

After years of imprisonment in the U.S., an Italian man comes back to Rome to live with his sister.

Inspired by a real-life event that took place in Calabria at the end of World War 2, the film is the story of a young farmer who led peasants to revolt, after being falsely accused of murder.

The film tells the life of the young Genoese poet and patriot Goffredo Mameli, who died in battle in Rome at the age of 21, in 1849. In addition to being one of the main exponents of the Risorgimento.

The story kicks off when a mysterious group organizes "Headshot", a recreation of a video game-inspired deathmatch featuring real people. Eight gamers, wearing custom armor and armed with air rifles, participate in the challenge, equipped with bodycams to broadcast the show live on the ZZIP platform. What appears to be a competition of wits and action, however, becomes a fight for survival, especially when the players discover a vicious killer among them.

A Donatello award nominated short drama about a wandering family, including a lady about to give birth, who get caught up in a the filming of a scene from a movie.

Vittorio Cottafavi's 1973 TV adaptation of Jean Anouih's play on Joan of Arc.

Two aging men bond over their respective heartbreaks, but it may not be over yet...

The boss has come up with something: Ed, outwardly a brave London citizen, attacks with a well-trained accomplice a van of the British Central Bank. The gangsters capture a million pounds sterling and can escape unrecognized. Scotland Yard is the target of the mockery, it comes to a government crisis. Only the hint of a child, who happened to witness the coup, brings the genre law enforcers on the right track.

Some kids find by chance an infant in swaddling clothes left in a meadow. Initially, after having led in their lair, they think of selling it to a caravan of gypsies.

Upon his release from prison, an ex-convict returns to his beloved city of Genoa, and to his lover.

In the city of Rome, a man is waiting for the woman he loves to return.

Two provincial stories, murky, mysterious and disturbing that shed a new light on apparent "small and sincere" paradises far from the metropolises and their devastating existences and instead so tangled and full of pitfalls.

Documentary short.

Police inspector Sciarra, struggling with an identity crisis, and Domenica, an orphan who would like to know about her mother, spend one day together along the streets of Naples. It's Sciarra's last day of work and he has to take Domenica to the morgue, to identify a man who might have raped her. To Domenica, Sciarra is a father she never had, to him she is the daughter he couldn't have.

Some of the cult protagonists of the television program "L'altra domenica" (The Other Sunday) delight in gags and skits in the name of fun. The film includes all the jokes, monologues, and gags that were cut from the previous film for runtime reasons.

A student falls in love with a woman he sees on a poster, with her face covered under a helmet.

Anna's Sin tells the story of a black American actor (Johnson) who falls in love with a white woman playing Desdemona to his Othello on the Italian stage.

Marco, close to turning eighteen, is a boy like many others: he has a girlfriend, lots of friends and is passionate about electronic music, especially DJ Claudio Coccoluto. One day he is the victim of a moped accident and ends up in an irreversible coma: family and friends gather around him in the hospital room, full of pain but also of hope.

There's a first time for everything, and thus Chinese multi-disciplinary artist Ai Weiwei set out to make his debut as an opera director, with an entire film crew following the meticulous preparations of this endeavour. Ai Weiwei's Turandot provides not only a rich insight into the creation process, but also offers a glimpse into the heart and brain of China's most famous artistic dissident.

The film tells, through the stories of four characters whose lives, in different forms and manners, are either changed or endangered by shoes, an object symbolizing desire par excellence, what we are willing to do to find our identity in the world, how far we go to be loved and accepted. It narrates a world where everyone desires what they don't have, where everyone wants to be what they are not.

A comic-fantastic opera by Tchaikovsky, also known as Cherevichki. In a small Ukrainian village, the devil decides to steal the moon to revenge himself on his enemy, Vakula the smith.

In the vast industrial spaces of the Pomodoro Foundation, Jannis Kounellis is preparing the installation for his "One-Act Play." A humble art, made of steel construction elements and animals, sacks of coal and piles of stones, grease, and fire. A small "film-shadowing," a "resonance of images that still linger in the memory as at the end of a beautiful journey."

After a big fight, a couple wakes up with an unbelievable problem: he can't speak and she can't hear anything. Doctors and exams are useless. A female Zen Master and a very special plant come to their aid.

Amazing Italian movie written and directed by Vittorio Sala and starring Félix Marten, Liana Orfei and Gastone Moschin. An adventurer steals a valuable diamond known as "Mountain of Light" from the museum. A band of gangsters gets on his trail to take his loot. It's going to be a long battle.

Composer Gioachino Rossini comes back to the three Italian cities — Rome, Naples, and Venice — and recalls artistic beauties and experiences of his life.

A mysterious black marble tablet is found in Syrian desert by an Arab terrorist after an attack on a UN scientific expedition.

The story of the dog from the title, who in a frame narrative explains how he came to be transformed from an unemployed communist filmmaker into a canine with a philosophical bent. Unable to finance his new project, young Berlin-based director Julian tells foreign exchange student Camille that his job in the countryside is research for an upcoming film. When Camille offers to help, he is forced to uphold the lie. The plantation isn’t the proletarian idyll he had hoped for, but fortunately the reincarnation of Francis of Assisi provides spiritual insight and a new aim in life.

On a whim, an American man offers a girl the sum of $100,000 if she will marry him.

An Italian businessman, Mario comes to the country and opens his shoe company in a small village. A middle-aged female worker falls in love with Mario, but she is not the only one whose life will be changed.

A young woman is wrongly jailed. In prison she finds a completely different world made of women who seem to have found the formula for freedom.

Three Italian womanizers in Bulgaria smooth-talk three local girls to bed and then vanish back to their country. But when the iron curtain suddenly falls, they fear that the girls might come to Italy to have them fulfill the promises made.

Alessia returns from the convent where she was educated to the farm where she spent her childhood. As she arrives, she starts to remember the crime that made her an orphan. The animosity she feels towards her aunt starts to get explained. Aunt Agnes was responsible for the crime, so she could get the land. Alessia starts to use her sexuality to manipulate the men around her and set a trap for her aunt as revenge.