Dario Zonta

The tale of an individualist proletarian in a time marked by the rise of mass political movements. In early 20th-century Italy, illiterate sailor Martin Eden seeks fame as a writer while torn between the love of a bourgeois girl and allegiance to his social class.

After the India of Varanasi’s boatmen, the American desert of the dropouts, and the Mexico of the killers of drugtrade, Gianfranco Rosi has decided to tell the tale of a part of his own country, roaming and filming for over two years in a minivan on Rome’s giant ring road—the Grande Raccordo Anulare, or GRA—to discover the invisible worlds and possible futures harbored in this area of constant turmoil. Elusive characters and fleeting apparitions emerge from the background of the winding zone: a nobleman from the Piemonte region and his college student daughter sharing a one-room efficiency in a modern apartment building along the GRA.

In an invisible territory at the margins of society, at the border between anarchy and illegality, lives a wounded community that is trying to respond to a threat: of being forgotten by political institutions and having their rights as citizens trampled. Disarmed veterans, taciturn adolescents, drug addicts trying to escape addiction through love, ex-special forces soldiers still at war with the world, floundering young women and future mothers, and old people who have not lost their desire to live. Through this hidden pocket of humanity, the door opens to the abyss of today's America.

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

Marta works for a poll company, listening all day to other people's dreams while leading a cold and solitary life. Having just cut off a long relationship, she tries an online sex chat under an alias, meeting a man who begins to advance more and more audacious requests, until they decide to discover their respective identities.

Pauline, a beguiling woman in her 60s, returns to her hometown, Turin, for the first time since she was ten years old. She has inherited her aunt’s apartment in town. In Turin Pauline contacts Dr. Angela Gualtieri, a psychologist whom she had met abroad some time before; Angela runs a maternity centre, the Melograno, a support centre where both mothers to be and young mothers with post natal depression seek help. At the Melograno they are constantly short of help, that’s why Angela asks Pauline to give her a hand in setting up an in-house archive collecting different material relating to maternity: video interviews to new mothers, mothers diaries, photo portraits of mother and child. Pauline accepts and starts her work plunging deep in an emotional material that touches her strongly: the controversial feelings experienced by women in their relation with the child.

Pulcinella, a foolish servant, is sent from the depths of Mt. Vesuvius to present-day Campania to grant the last wish of poor shepherd Tommaso, who spent his whole life looking after a crumbling Bourbon estate: his mission is to save a young buffalo named Sarchiapone. Pulcinella takes the buffalo north and the two servants, man and beast, travel through a beautiful and lost Italy.