Marco Alessi

As well as providing the subject for Luc Besson’s The Big Blue, Jacques Mayol did more than anyone to establish the sport of free diving to enormous depths without an oxygen supply. Using breathing techniques derived from yoga, he went to 50, 60, and even 100 meters—depths no one had considered to be within the bounds of human possibility. Mayol was a sportsman, a mystic, a vagabond, but above all, a man who believed in testing the limits of experience. This visually stunning tribute shows a man’s quest to be at one with the vastness of the ocean and to have no fear of the abyss within, where lurks serenity, freedom and finally, death.

The year is 1764. For over a year, Josef has been leading a precarious life in Venice. He hopes to become an opera composer. The city, full of talented and already-established composers, seems closed to him. Looking for work as a violinist, he comes into the orbit of a rich young woman. Thanks to her, he gets the opportunity to play at salons. But his real opportunity arises when he becomes the lover of a libertine marquise. She teaches him worldly manners, rids him of signs of a provincial upbringing and introduces him to a hedonistic existence free from religious intolerance. Thus transformed, Josef gets an incan incredible commission: to write an opera for the San Carlo, Europe's largest theatre.

In the rural outskirts of Gaza City a small community of farmers, the Samouni extended family, is about to celebrate a wedding. It's going to be the first celebration since the latest war. Amal, Fuad, their brothers and cousins have lost their parents, their houses and their olive trees. The neighborhood where they live is being rebuilt. As they replant trees and plow fields, they face their most difficult task: piecing together their own memory. Through these young survivors' recollections, Samouni Road conveys a deep, multifaceted portrait of a family before, during and after the tragic event that changed its life forever.

After a painful journey through Europe, Aleksei, a Belarusian, joins the Foreign Legion in France and clings to a confused hope of a European identity. Jomo, a Nigerian, fights for the survival and durability of his people in the Niger Delta and is ready to die to defend his ideas. These two young people who are sacrificed and smashed together will, against all odds, meet and their destinies will merge to continue across borders, bodies, life and death...

Giacomo, the main character, 35 years of laziness, is a man who doesn't know and doesn't want to fight. He is a introvert curmudgeon, a little bit nerd but not very social, who walks with the look downward on his device without giving to the people what they would like from him: only a little bit of attention and enthusiasm. He loses his job, he is left by his wife and coincidentally he remains closed in the women's bathroom of the art-house cinema, together with the owner's small dog.

Leone is a rich and powerful man whose loneliness drives him to hire a cast of actors to play the family he never had. On Christmas Eve, reality and make-believe start to get blurred.

Seven thirty-something friends organise a post-grad trip they were never able to take after school. They find new adventures on a Greek island, and show that true maturity is never really achieved.

In the heart of Rome, face to Saint Peter’s, stands a Palace. The owner, like a renaissance patron, has once been offering shelter to a bizarre group of friends, embracing their joyfully ambitious causes. The perfect hideout from where to pursue the most aleatory artistic projects, far from the hassles of life. Now in their 50s’, they are suddenly reunited by the premature death of their charismatic leader, Mauro. He left something tangible to the group of friends: hours of footage where he directed them in the most diverse roles, a supposed masterpiece that was never finished, and now a a mirror reflecting images from the past. The mourning, in the shudder of a moment, shakes the numbed spirits, leading them into a radical confrontation with their future.

The film, based on the novel "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, tells of mysterious incidents in a villa located on an island in the middle of a lake. Teresa is sent to the villa to educate Milo and Flora, two orphaned children entrusted to Elia, rude man. But upon her arrival, a bereavement upsets throughout her stay: the suicide of the former educator of the children, Eleonora Petri, whose body is found a few days later on the banks of the lake. From then on, Teresa will have strange dreams every night and assist in mysterious apparitions. The various events will bring Teresa to protect the two children and try to discover the mysteries and secrets surrounding the villa and involving all its guests.

Stuck in a seaside town hoping to find the next big influencer, a marketer hatches a dubious plan to turn a mechanic into a social media sensation.

Gian, a 65-year-old ethnomusicology professor, fights the darkness caused by the sudden onset of amnesia. Flashes of the past, that blend with hazy archive footage, haunt his mind like a phantasmagoria of images. Despairing, Gian tries to end things, but he fails. In the aftermath, Miriam, the daughter he does not recognize, moves into his apartment with her son Elyas. She helps him find a diary written into his twenties that revolves around Leila, a girl with whom he discovers love in the space of one night. This emotion exacerbates Gian’s pain but pushes him to recover his memory.

The story of Romeo and Juliet is exactly the opposite: two families, the Casisa and the Vitrano, who adore each other, and their two children, Anna and Claudio, students away from home and longtime lovers, who hate each other and want nothing to do with each other. When they return home, the two find an idyllic situation: the friendship between their families is so strong that they've even joined forces in business. The Casisa, ricotta producers, and the Vitrano, producers of cannoli shells, will sell "the lovers' cannoli," for which Claudio and Anna will be the unwitting ambassadors. It's so difficult to tarnish that picture that the two not only lack the courage to admit they've broken up, but, gripped by an increasingly childish fear, they complicate matters by telling outright lies: not only do they announce their wedding, but also the imminent birth of a child. From here, a hilarious game of misunderstandings begins, which will lead them to commit the wrong elopement.

A coming-of-age crime story about a young boy who plays and gets lost in the wood.

Daniele is a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island on the edges of the Venice Lagoon. He lives on his wits, isolated even from his peer group who are busy exploring an existence of pleasure-seeking expressed in the cult of the barchino (motorboat). This obsession focuses on the building of ever more powerful engines to transform the little lagoon launches into dangerously fast racing boats. Daniele too dreams of a record-breaking barchino, one that will take him to the top of the leader board, but everything he does to further his dream and win respect from the others turns out to be tragically counterproductive. The decline that erodes the relationships, environment and habits of a rootless generation is observed from the timeless perspective of the Venetian landscape and its island outskirts: the point of no return is a foolish, vestigial tale of male initiation. Violent and destined to fail, it explodes dragging the ghost city along on a psychedelic shipwreck.

Inspired by real life events, Madame Luna tells the story of an Eritrean refugee who is washed ashore in Libya and survives to become one of the most notorious human smugglers, with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. Now trapped in Italy and forced to experience the brutalising reality endured by the people she has exploited in the past, Madame Luna must try to find a way out before she is recognized and brought to justice. In the process she forms a powerful bond with a younger version of herself.

A committed environmentalist whose hyperfixation with everything that's wrong with the world is taking a toll on his marriage tries a pill that reduces human brain capacity from the usual 20% to a mere 2%. Which puts him on a par with your typical man on the street.

According to Interpol, over ten thousand refugees of minors without parental care are wandering today in Europe, half of which are on Italian roads. "Despite the Fog" is a movie story about one of them. In short: Ali-Musa Sarhan, a refugee whose parents drowned while traveling by rubber boat on the Italian coast in search of a better life, is accepted by family, husband and wife who have lost a child. They are trying to find solace in little Arab and a sort of replacement for their early deceased son, Mark. Valeria (Donatella Finokjaro) and Paolo (Giorgio Tirabasi) are increasingly confronted with resistance from the environment and their own family, who do not accept their decision to keep Muhammad - It is also a story of a world that is increasingly sinking into xenophobic fog.

From Facebook thumbs up to the battle of stones, a history of hope, fear, despair, anger, pride and elation, the film is the real-time chronicle of the two most exciting weeks in the history of modern Egypt as lived by their protagonists. Since the 25th of January 2011, together with thousands of other Egyptian citizens, No ha, Ahmed and Essayed have been involved in a massive movement of street protest for political freedom. Day after day, sleepless night after sleepless night, until the capitulation of the defeated pharaoh, the film follows these young and unexpected heroes along their shattering fight to conquer their freedom.

A cold-lighted Palermo of the 90's. A single day. Unnamed characters slide towards the fulfillment of their destiny. A story of causes and effects, in which crimes affect not only the victims, but the perpetrators too. And from which no one, in a way or another, will stay unscathed.

True crime anthology series about female murderers.