Daniela Ceselli

The story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy living in Bologna, Italy, who in 1858, after being secretly baptized, was forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian. His parents’ struggle to free their son became part of a larger political battle that pitted the papacy against forces of democracy and Italian unification.

The 1978 kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, president of the most important political party in Italy at the time, Democrazia Cristiana, as seen from the perspective of one of his assailants -- a conflicted young woman in the ranks of the Red Brigade.

The story of the descent into madness of Mussolini's secret first wife, Ida Dasler, who was seduced by his passion and vigor but blind to the fascist dictator's many flaws.

Dino and Anna are a couple in their forties. Their relationship is hardly conventional: in fact, it is unconsummated. Dino gets out of it, gratifying himself with prostitutes and swingers. He reaches his nadir when he looks up Anna’s old boyfriends to ask about their sexual relations with her, and even begs them to take her back, as a way to end their relationship. Anna can’t find a way out herself; she can’t bring herself to end this one-of-a-kind, tormented love affair. In the end, Dino’s angst is what makes her feel loved, feel unique. No solution seems to be waiting in the wings.

Forty year-old Bruno Ledeux, seen sitting across from the doctor, gives the impression of a man who is no longer young but not yet old.Condemned to remain nothing more than a son, he begins his downward slide, as if a fog had shut him in a cage from which there is no escape. Bruno can never have children .He says nothing about this diagnosis to Anne, his beloved wife. Nor does he tell her about a large debt he has taken out. It is as if Bruno were a man without any qualities or talents. A mediocre man who has lost all pride. Though now everything appears hazy in his memory. Like a river that flows peacefully, showing no signs of the hidden currents at work below. But at times those currents can return to the surface. Without warning.

A celebrated painter receives a visit from a cardinal's assistant, who informs him that his mother could become a saint.

White mannequin mask, fiery red wig, voice disguised as the distortion: Laika (like the dog that was launched into space on Soviet Sputnik) has enlivened the walls of Rome in recent pandemic years with posters and murals that scream civil indignation (the best known is the one who imagines a hug between Giulio Regeni and Patrick Zaki). Two years of battles of the street artist with a mysterious identity, followed in his night outings by the camera of Antonio Valerio Spera, who mixes fragments of Laika's video notes with a pop spirit, interviews with the recipients of his messages, archive materials on the "hot" topics dealt with by the artist and, of course, his works. To relive these years through the eyes and talent of a woman who defines herself as "a Roman attacker" and demonstrates a profound moral and artistic awareness.

Where I've never been to live, Francesca's emotional conflicts, 50, is the only daughter of a famous Turin architect, to whom she visits only on rare occasions. For many years, Francesca lives in Paris with her teenage daughter and her husband Benoît, a financier on her sixty, apparently reserved but paternal and protective about her. Due to a domestic accident that forces the elderly father to bed, the woman flees to Turin to take her parents in the design of a villa on a lake for a young couple. At work he meets architect Massimo, his peer-minded career and engaged in an open relationship with independent Sandra. After a tough first approach, Massimo and Francesca create a strong professional tune that leads to a deep and passionate feeling. For the first time in life, both will have to really confront themselves and their most authentic destinies ...

Marco Bellocchio in his interview with Joyce in 1994 talks about his attitude towards life devoid of dreams and illusions, but extremely active, asking her how it is possible to transmit the extraordinary things that she has lived. Her straw handbag still hanging on a door of her room, the cuckoo of the room, the wicker rocking chair, her colored combs resting in the bathroom near the mirror, the Sardinian carpets, the flowers that Angela always puts on the kitchen table, the reeds dancing with the wind. Joyce's house in Fermo, in the Marche region, is a house that breathes life, a life many times dramatic but also rich in poetry. The period of exile with Emilio Lussu in Paris, the struggles of women in Sardinia, the translations of poets who wrote "useful poetry", the one that comes directly, without too many words, to the knowledge of other realities and to sentiment.

Valeria is a passive onlooker to her own life in Turin, and she grows so obsessed with the activities of her neighbor Massimo that when he moves to Rome she decides to follow him. There she meets and unexpectedly befriends Massimo's companion Flavia, and becomes enmeshed in both of their lives.