Gianluca Matarrese

Footwear company Togo was a family business that thrived reaching the point of owning more than 30 stores in the wider Turin area. All that is left today is a couple of struggling stores, enormous suffocating debt, and the desperation of uncertainty as bankruptcy is looming in. Director Gianluca Mattarese has been living in Paris for the last 18 years meticulously fencing himself off from the harsh reality of a family breakdown. Like a prodigal son, he eventually returns to his roots with the task of recording a routine of malaise framed by financial collapse. A bittersweet tale of family bonds, reuniting, and atonement.

At Milan’s Niguarda public hospital, the unconventional Dr. Bini leads a bold mission overseeing aspiring parents undergoing in vitro fertilization and the journeys of individuals reconciling their bodies with their gender identities. He navigates the constraints set by a conservative government and an aggressive market eager to commodify bodies.

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.

This is the tale of three artists who navigate the fashion world: from the front rows at shows to their tiny hotel rooms, constantly on the move, they struggle to thrive in social media culture in a decaying world which is now forced to reinvent itself.

Director Christophe Blanc delivers a fast-past thriller set to a background of Finland's stunning landscape. High-end car dealership owner Maxime is pursued by Finnish gangsters over unsatisfactory cars his dead partner sold them.

Bernard just retired. He is 63 years old. He lives alone with his two cats and decides to move in the house where he will live the last chapter of the book of his life. While packing, he starts to have to choose what to take with him. Bernard is my master and I am his slave. His last lover. I help him put away his whip in a box, between the remains of his memory, tokens of lovers stripped from his arms by AIDS, traces of a foster family that pushed him away, of a rigid education that marked him, of a mother and a father that he never met. Our sexual games are the possibility for two generations to meet: between a whip and a leather harness we discuss love, death, the AIDS epidemic of the 80s, his new life project, us. The wounds and the grave goods of a survivor, a cry of life under the lights of sexual pulsions.

Every month, hundreds of unemployed nurses travel from the south to the north of Italy in search of work. Two of them organise the trips by overnight buses; a long journey of hope that often leads to nothing at all. Shot as a road movie, the two filmmakers paint a pitiless portrait of modern Italy before, during and after the health crisis.