Discoveries from Italy World Cinema

On the plane back to Rome, a well-known journalist indulges in an unbridled and somewhat melodramatic erotic fantasy involving his estranged wife and his stepdaughter.

Roberto, a drummer in a rock band, keeps receiving weird phone calls and being followed by a mysterious man. One night he manages to catch up with his persecutor and tries to get him to talk but in the ensuing struggle he accidentally stabs him. He runs away, but he understands his troubles have just begun when the following day he receives an envelope with photos of him killing the man. Someone is killing all his friends and trying to frame him for the murders.

Set in Mexico under the rule of Emperor Maximilian I, Sabata is hired by the guerrilla leader Señor Ocaño to steal a wagonload of gold from the Austrian army. However, when Sabata and his partners Escudo and Ballantine obtain the wagon, they find it is not full of gold but of sand, and that the gold was taken by Austrian Colonel Skimmel. So Sabata plans to steal back the gold.

Inside an apartment in Milan, two gay boys talk about their feelings towards dating apps.

Milan, Italy, 1967. Santo Russo, a boy of Calabrian origin, arrives north with his parents and younger brother to find better living conditions. Due to an absurd misunderstanding and his father's contempt, Santo ends up in prison, where he gets a “true education.” In 1978, he and his friends Slim and Mario embark on a 15-year criminal career, a successful and ruthless spiral of robberies, kidnappings, murders and heroin smuggling.

After Saleem is released from prison after twenty years, he stays alone at home, haunted by nightmares, while Cosette tries to reconnect with him and understand why he’s isolating himself, hoping to help him face his past and rebuild their relationship. Will she succeed?

The life and career of Italian opera singer Farinelli, considered one of the greatest castrato singers of all time.

A woman with psychic powers has a vision of a murder that took place in a house owned by her husband.

Carlo Monti is a young man who wants to reveal the secret of his mother's mysterious death which occurred in a strange car accident many years ago. He is an illegitimate son of a late film director. Carlo learns where his father's home was and goes there because he thinks his father was involved in the accident. There he meets Emma, a glamorous young woman, who claims to be Carlo's sister. Carlo is attracted by her beauty but he soon realizes that he has got involved in a dangerous and mysterious affair...

A montley group of free-lance photographers are desperate to grab a good shot of a celebrity.

Six high school friends in their 40s who haven't seen each other in nearly 20 years rekindle their younger selves after a court cancels their diploma, forcing them to repeat the final high school exam.

A year after their romance began in Riccione, Vincenzo and Camilla reunite for a vacation on the picturesque Amalfi Coast and put their love to the test.

Indian sheriff Thunder is transferred to a small town in the desert. He learns that the corrupt deputy is paid by the drug mob. To protect himself, the deputy sets a trap for Thunder and gets him convicted as dealer. Thunder manages to break out of the brutal prison camp and takes bloody revenge. However he cannot sufficiently protect his pregnant wife.

Marquise is a drama about the rise and fall of a beauteous actress. As cheerfully portrayed by Sophie Marceau, the eponymous heroine is an engagingly ribald, but perhaps rather too modern, character. She rises from an impoverished background to become a favourite of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the mistress of the celebrated Racine, who wrote roles especially for her; but her fate, in the end, is a tragic one.

A special forces team infiltrate the 'Golden Triangle' between Brazil and Colombia to kidnap notorious drug baron.

Pasquale Baudaffi, on amnesty, comes out of prison and starts looking for a job with the help of his cousin Gaetano. But first he goes to what was once a brothel, but, unbeknownst to our hapless hero, has been taken over and rented as a dental office. Pasquale finds himself at the center of endless misunderstandings. He tries to be a gamekeeper but that's not okay, he tries to be a waiter in a bar: he immediately gets his orders wrong and he is fired. His performance as a garage keeper was negative. The very latest experience is in an electronics company but its insertion into the futuristic mechanism triggers the craziest complications. The encounter with a lost dog allows him to get to know his mistress and thus discover the woman of his life.

A young American woman moves to a large countryside villa with her newlywed Italian husband. Soon enough, strange and seemingly supernatural events begin to befall the property, as a black-gloved killer simultaneously picks up and murders prostitutes.

A down-on-his-luck author makes the find of a lifetime in the remote Columbian jungle, in the form of an alien spacecraft . He sets off to announce his find to the world, but finds that a mishmash of government agents, organized crime members, neo-Nazi extremists and extraterrestrials are all out to prevent him from revealing his discovery.

An unhappy family in a remote village in Calabria: Luisa is at war with the world since day one. She is juggling odd jobs, her love for her children and granddaughter, and her feuding with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law. While the two women exchange insults and call in the cops, three elderly aunts, a tragicomic chorus, try in vain to keep the peace.

Puglia, southern Italy, around 1400. A convent is invaded by the Tarantula cult, whose fanatical and crazed members desecrate the sacred place by committing obscene and bloody acts.

In 18th-century Rome, impish aristocrat Onofrio del Grillo amuses himself by playing pranks on all sorts of people — his reactionary family and fellow nobles, the poors, the French occupiers trying to modernize society, and even the Pope himself.

A rich businessman is fed up with work, family, society, and goes with his accountant to Africa, in search of his brother-in-law who had vanished there in mysterious circumstances. They will find him alright - as a tribal chief, surrounded with lots of topless, shapely wives. They are going to return to civilisation, but will their friend come with them?

France, 1915. Young and radiantly beautiful Centaine de Thiry is the happiest woman in the world: in a few more hours she will be married to pilot Michael Courteney, the love of her life. But fate has it otherwise: Michael is shot down in a reconnaissance plane shortly before his wedding. Life has lost its meaning for Centaine. When the young woman realizes soon afterwards that she is expecting a baby, her zest for live is revived. She decides to give birth to the child in South Africa, the home country of her deceased fiancé.

Rome, early 20th century: a wealthy psychiatrist, who runs an asylum for women and lacks imagination in his practice, must find a wet nurse for his infant when his wife panics after childbirth. He brings a peasant, Annette, to Rome, forcing her to leave her own baby behind. To the consternation and increasing anger of the wife, the nanny immediately bonds with the couple's infant son - Annette's a natural. Against a backdrop of leftist demonstrations, Annette, who's lover is a teacher jailed for subversion, asks the doctor to teach her to read and write. Her nature and curiosity, the doctor's bland ideas, he and his wife's problems, and the two infants bring the story to a head.

A daughter torn between two mothers, one who raised her with love and her biological mother, who instinctively claims her back.

Poet/lecturer Charles Serking awakens from his alcoholic haze long enough to take a bus back to L.A. and plunge into an orgy of drink and sexual depravity.

This coarse bedroom farce takes place at the St. Moritz ski resort over a Christmas vacation. Among the couples whose lives intersect are a widowed artist honeymooning with his second wife, a gay man traveling with his son and his lover (and hiding each from the other), a snobbish couple from Milan who have been forced to share a suite with a pair of crass Romans, etc.

In Naples, a voice from the skies announces one morning that the final judgment will be at 6 p.m. on that day. What follows is a series of vignettes depicting various people's reactions (or lack thereof) to the announcement.

Nadine is a French young woman. Fausto is an Italian young man trying to make it in Paris as a restaurant waiter. They accidentally meet at a five-star hotel. Both are fragile, alone and obsessed with the idea of an unattainable happiness. Their intense love is challenged by their own individual ambition and desperation.

Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.

In late 18th century Venice, in a convent school for girls, Teresa, a student with prophetic gifts, joins forces with some amazing music-makers. They create a new kind of pop, bright and bold, and challenge the ancient and rigid system.

Sweet-sour comedy on Italy's 1950s rage to get rich as fast as possible! The businessman wants to satisfy his wife's craving for luxury and a "respectable life" so he becomes heavily indebted. In desperation he agrees to sell a precious part of his body for a large sum of money. But just before the crucial operation he panics...

Years after declaring her eternal virginity and opting to live life as a man in the mountains of Albania, Hana looks to return to living as a woman as she settles into a new existence in modern-day Milan.

To mark his passage into manhood, young Ilias is gifted a magical bow by his father and embarks upon a journey into the wilderness to rid the land of evil, all the while battling the witch Ocron, who wishes to steal the bow for her own nefarious ends.

Heartbroken that their children no longer want to spend time with them, two parents fake an inheritance to bring the family together for Christmas.

It's 1577. The Mother Superior at the convent of Archangel is seriously ill. The determined and calculating Mother Giulia plots to become the next Mother Superior. She receives tough competition from tormented lesbian Sister Chiara and the lusty Sister Carmela.

Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman is unhappily married to Beatrice and unconsciously in love with Catherine, the niece that they have raised from childhood. Into his house come two brothers, illegal immigrants, Marco and Rodolpho. Catherine falls in love with Rudolpho; and Eddie, tormented but unable to admit even to himself his quasi-incestuous love, reports the illegal immigrants to the authorities.

In Augusta the emperor Caligula has a serious problem: he must demonstrate his manliness "coram populo" on the occasion of the feast of Priapus. But the Imperial young man is powerless and threatens a fool in front of the people who arrive in droves to watch the battle. To avoid this conflict, he goes to the professor Barnardus and attempts to hide out in his clinic.

Napoleon, exiled, devises a plan to retake the throne. He'll swap places with commoner Eugene Lenormand, sneak into Paris, then Lenormand will reveal himself and Napoleon will regain his throne. Things don't go at all well; first, the journey proves more difficult than expected, but more disastrously, Lenormand enjoys himself too much to reveal the deception. Napoleon adjusts somewhat uneasily to the life of a commoner while waiting, while Lenormand gorges on rich food.

Three women from different walks of life, all struggling with various personal issues, come together as caretakers at an elderly home.

God casts Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden because Eve decided to have a fling with a visiting Cro-Magnon named Bearkiller. The disgraced couple find themselves on the outside up against an assortment of various dinosaurs, flying monsters and cannibals.

Robber Roy King loses his wife, Alicia, to revolutionary Montero. Despite their rivalry they collaborate in an attempt to rob the Mexican government of one million dollars.

In Christmastime Miami, heartbroken divorcée Giorgio invites himself to stay at his best friend Mario's — unaware that the latter is having an affair with his ex-wife — and ends up pursued by Mario's barely-of-age daughter; nosy and out-of-touch Ranuccio crashes his son's sex-themed holidays before ending up in a series of mishaps with Giorgio.

All the games and behind-the-scenes of Silvio Berlusconi's power, including politics, media and soccer. Citizen Berlusconi is the original version of the documentary written by Andrea Cairola and Susan Gray broadcast on August 21, 2003, during the Wide Angle program of Thirteen/Wnet New York, the major U.S. public TV station Pbs.

After the assault of a young woman in their seaside town, a security expert and his family get caught in a powerful riptide of secrets and lies.

A seagull is caught by the black tide of a sinking petrol ship. She manages to fly inland and falls down in a garden by a cat. Moribund, she asks the cat to fulfill three promises: that when she lays her egg he must not eat it; that he must take care of it until it hatches; that he would teach the newborn how to fly.

Ten segments, all starring Johnny Dorelli and all having sex and sexual perversions as main theme.

Witness how human nature can reveal that there are forces within us that are either challenged by - or reflected in - the people and environments that surround us in these five short films from around the world that take a closer look at the gay experience.

Emanuelle is out to avenge her sister, who committed suicide after escaping from her sadistic lover Carlo. So she chains Carlo up in her basement, drugs him, and forces him to watch her having sex. As Carlo begins to hallucinate all kinds of bloody horrors and cannibalistic doings, he decides he has to break free and kill Emanuelle.

Bomber is an unemployed boat captain. One day he meets Jerry, a manager of boxers who are struck by the force of his fists. That is when they see the chance to win big money.

In the Catholic and traditionalist Italy, two teenagers covertly discover new prohibited games.

Don Camillo (now bishop) and Peppone (now senator) return to the town of Brescello and rekindle their friendly rivalry.

Silvio refuses to fight for the fascists and joins the resistance with Elena. After the war, his vitriolic newspaper articles cause him to be sentenced to imprisonment.

The official sequel to the original shockumentary, presenting new and bizarre behavior from around the world, including cruelty, graphic gore, and strange rituals.

A demented nun sliding through morphine addiction into madness, while presiding over a regime of lesbianism, torture and death. Sister Gertrude is the head nurse/nun in a general hospital, whose increasingly psychotic behavior endangers the staff and patients around her.

The sexual relationship between a successful woman and her brother, an introvert, hypochondriacal youth, who is also a pornophile.

In early 20th-century Sicily, Eugenia Di Maqueda and Raimondo Corrao discover on their wedding night that they are brother and sister and therefore unable to consummate their marriage. For the sake of the family inheritance and honour, the two decide not to reveal the truth to anyone. In public, they will play the part of husband and wife, but in private they will live in absolute chastity as siblings. Meanwhile, the beautiful Eugenia’s urgent carnal desires become increasingly pressing...

Roberto is a doctor in a small town near Naples. He suffers from a severe heart disease and he is heading toward an American hospital for a dangerous surgery with little or no hope of surviving. Therefore he talks to his best friend since childhood, Michele, a columnist at the local newspaper, explaining his last and long-wanted desire: having sex once with his Swedish beautiful wife, Frida.

Claire de La Tour Picquet shares her life between her husband, the successful novelist William Brandeis, and her lover, Jacques Lalouet, William's publisher. Then she discovers that her lover has a mistress, Charlie, who is also that of her husband...

Travelling family man Paolo agrees to pose as husband to an unwed pregnant girl he meets on a train. However, once faced with her father, things do not go as planned.