Enrico Giovannone

Siddharta and Fabrizio, one of them nine years old, the other one 65, are the core of a community that renounces every civilising comfort. We are their guests – for one summer.

Jorge leaves his home and family in the outskirts of Lima to try his luck in the goldmines of the Andes, chasing the promises of the mother lode. We follow Jorge through a journey full of omens, where reality and magical thinking blend together, as he discovers that the myth of wealth is built on sacrifices that become ever more tangible – while the boundaries between victims and oppressors get progressively vague and blurred. Mother Lode is a fable about the banality of the descent to hell in times of neoliberalism; it is a paradigm of a relentless world in which everything can be sacrificed in the name of profit.

Issa is a young undocumented immigrant, struggling to survive in a large city in Italy. Thanks to a friend who lends him his identity, he starts to work as a food courier. The precarious balance collapses when his bike is stolen. As he desperately searches for it, Issa is sucked into a dramatic spiral of events.

On her last day at the diner, Sara prepares to leave the city. Denis watches her, trying to hold on to what they both fear losing. In a crystallised, suspended landscape, their goodbye reveals the depth of their bond and the poignant intensity of severance.

Havana, Cuba, 54th year of US embargo. After helping hundreds of Cubans to travel to the US, Lourdes has finally the chance of getting a visa to see her dying mother in Miami. She waited a lifetime for this moment.

Zheng is a young lonely Chinese man, who works in Italy since he was a child. In spite of having succeeded to leave the factory and build up his own position he doesn’t feel fulfilled. Struggled between the rigor of his work and the desire of entering into contact with his peers, Zheng is going to be called to take a decision.

This autobiographical film, standing on the borderline between reality and fiction, explores diverse forms of faith and spirituality. Director Irene Dorigotti guides the film dressed in a Boy Scout uniform – a reminder of her family heritage – as she travels through her native Italy and remote areas, meeting spiritual leaders and ordinary people. For her, these encounters mark decisive moments in her spiritual journey and in her discovery of the role that religion can play in the life of contemporary man. Poetic images of landscapes, dreamlike passages and fragments of personal history, together with poignant music, create a powerful statement about the nature of humanity.

Pietro lives in Turin with his drug-addicted brother in an apartment he inherited from them. He makes a living by handing out flyers and has a mild intellectual disability, which makes him the target of ridicule from his brother's friends. One day he meets a girl, and something in his life changes.

Vincenzo, with OCD, runs a gas station on a quiet road. Only a woman seems to notice him and she lights something in Vincenzo.

Sunday night. Alex is an ultras, his team has just lost a match and he is going home empty-headed. In the absence of his parents, he lives with his grandmother and sells Rivotril tablets to make some money. On a night that’s struggling to take off, Alex goes down to the basement and into a cellar where a bunch of people are gathered. A rap battle is in progress. Nemy is a girl with refined bars, who dances confidently and sinuously. She notices Alex and seeks him out. Together they venture into the night, driving in a stolen car. Two solitudes that recognise each other. Their bodies brush against each other in what seems to be the beginning of a story.

An Italian documentary about No Tav movement.

The village of Poschiavo and its valley as a new Far West, more than six years after the killing of the M13 bear.

In a hot summer, the lives of the children are about to be changed forever when two girls are found raped and murdered. The children know who the suspect is but knowing that the adults will never believe them, they decide to keep quiet. When one of their friends sister disappear, they know they have to take the matter into their own hands.

The Merchant (Harvey Keitel) is a Westerner. A merchant dealing in precious stones from Afganistan and Turkey. He's above suspicion. In truth, the "Stone Merchant" is a Christian convert into Islam. He's rich, cultured, fascinating. Leda (Jane March) is a successful woman who works as Head of the Public Relations for a big company. She's married to Alceo, a professor at the Sapienza University, specialized in the history of terrorist movements. Alceo is on a wheel chair. He lost his legs in the attack to the American Embassy in Nairobi in 1998. Shahid is a terrorist. Now he's planning an attack along the English Channel. Their lives, their destinies cross in Turkey, where Leda and Alceo are on holiday. And the plot will go on to Rome and Turin till the epilogue of the attack on the ferry boat.

The ostensibly simple story of a sympathetic veteran teacher giving Italian lessons to a weekly class of diverse immigrants is given infinitely more depth and complexity by the manner in which director Daniele Gaglianone renders his story. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, truth and artifice, and between documentary and drama, Gaglianone has created a film within a film. You see the apparent artifice of Gaglianone’s crew using professionals, including the noted film actor Valerio Mastandrea as the teacher, interlinked with ‘real’ immigrant protagonists, studying the language to improve their chances of employment and of gaining a permanent residence permit. Thus in the course of the lessons there is simultaneously the painful and upsetting relation of the students’ personal stories but also humour, as they interact and share their humanity, bridging cultural differences, united in their striving to make a better life for themselves. (Source: LFF programme)

A Million Grains of Sand is a film that explores emergency psychological intervention. How does one survive a massacre carried out by Isis, an earthquake in China, a bombing in Ukraine? In this cinematic documentary, Andrea Deaglio follows psychotherapist Eva Pattis Zoja on an enlightening and poignant journey around the world, where they will confront unimaginable trauma and paths to healing.

Georgia, Lorena, Elena, and Jessica are four different women who all faced marginalization and didn't turn away. They stayed where they felt they belonged.

A journey through three distant cultures, retracing the steps that give rise to the breath of life: its primeval discovery, the circularity of breathing, the harmony of song, the colour of each single voice and the connection with the innermost part of the self.

Adventure of children and adults, fancied trips and everyday tragedies. The city and the countryside. Real and dreamt life. An experimental film inspired to the life of Emilio Salgari and his novel Yolanda, daughter of the Black Corsair. The movie is part of a series produced by Quarto Film on the 150th anniversary of Salgari's birth.

When the past re-emerges, it can prove to be uncontrollable and become another present, the here and now of a space that is contemporaneously clear-cut and indefinite, suspended within a frame of mind that can take your breath away. The movie is a journey inside this dimension, as it recounts what it means to cross this threshold and teeter between unexpected tears and sudden laughter. A reflection on old age and what you can discover by looking at yourself in this mirror, the film is the outcome of a long process of listening and dozens of lengthy encounters in five regions in Italy, in search of yesterday’s world, that sometimes seems very far away and sometimes strangely present.