Tommaso Barbaro

Saint Anthony, Abbot of the Desert, protector of animals, is a central figure in the Italian countryside, where fortune depends on the health of the animals. To heal his donkey, Antonio asks the village priest to bless the sick animal. Faced with his refusal, the young farmer confides directly in the Saint, hoping that he will perform a miracle.

"A group of jazz musicians come to a recording studio to play a jam session together. Their improvisation is matched to the rhythm of a tape of freely available footage from security cameras around the world. People and animals, city and nature, joys and tragedies. In conjunction with music, the videos are stripped of their original surveillance function and become vague, abstract, liberated images." -Ji.hlava IDFF 2021

An apocalyptic film is suddenly interrupted by a strange ad. A man in suit and tie appears to deliver a message to the spectators and the director.

Milan, western suburbs. In one of the nine districts ("zone") of the city, the students of the "Rosa Luxemburg" trade school meditate over the meaning of living in the suburbs. And they do so using their smartphones, filming their days and looking for a common thread among their lives. Crossing and mixing video-diaries, documentary shooting and fictional scenes, the project struggles to take a definite shape: every character and perspective channels the tale in a different direction, escaping from linear narrative lines and bringing us to some kind of archipelago.

In the summer of their twelfth year Matteo and Samuele spend their days between the river, the forest and the shopping center, but compared to previous years, something is changing. The game becomes boring, imagination gives way to discovery, adventure turns into life experience. A summer without beginning and without end, the story about a friendship, an age and a land which are obliged to change with the inexorable passage of time.

Goffredo Fofi does not want to be considered an intellectual but he has spent his life founding magazines, writing books, reviewing movies. The film portrays his tireless political and cultural work, his encounters with famous figures, the extra-parliamentary groups, ideological excesses, discovering new authors and directors. Social work as a political resource. The profile of a heretical intellectual and an extraordinary cultural organizer reveals a very critical view of Italian society, its power mechanisms, and the injustice that leaves a mark on it.

A woman wanders in a big and empty parking lots following a man who she seems to want to ambush. From her gestures something furious and menacing emerges. Everything seems to draw back to a woods beyond her abandoned home, a place that hides the true nature of her actions.

In South Ethiopia, an ambulance driver has to bring a young lady to the hospital for delivery, but the nearest one is 300 km far from the village. It’s a long journey along a road full of mud.

A series of unforeseen accidents collide with a seemingly happy young couple and their dog, revealing devastating lies, betrayals and their true selves.

A subway station at night. A group of sixteen-year-olds is having a discussion. They are planning to enter a school and paint a graffiti. They argue with Cora, one of the group, for bringing along a boy she is going out with. The teenagers embark on a vandalism spree in the corridors of the empty school, setting off a night of turmoil and paranoia, of betrayal and violence.

Tired of their lives, two lovers take refuge in a perpetual role-playing game, through which they explore other identities and new versions of their relationship.

In a large, empty gym, the protagonists Iris and Lea play hide-and-seek: time seems to stand still, while the approach of an airplane transforms reality in a mysterious and poetic way.

Armando, a 15-year-old Roma teenager, lives with his mother and siblings in the suburbs of Milan. The family is about to leave the shacks to move to Berlin, where his mother’s partner found a job and a house. In the two days before departure, Armando moves through his teenage friends, his first love and a nostalgia for a Milan that is now home.

A film about the Swiss Italian poet Fabio Pusterla and his creative poetic process, his struggle to find an honest language, one which adheres to the personal experience and is able to unfold a hidden truth that creates a strong and profound bond with the other, with his public.

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.

Domenico, an old shepherd, spends his days with his sheep in high altitude, without electricity or water. Nisida, a 90-year-old widow, moved by her faith, decides to undertake a pilgrimage to the Hermitage of San Bartolomeo. Nicola, a retired fisherman, lives with a white cat in the ruins of his village. Three solitary figures, in the land of Abruzzo, resilient to time and carrying on the old ways, who tune into the “pace of the water.” A contemplative and atmospheric homage to the ancient peasant tradition, as well as a farewell nod to a vanishing way of life.

The world of fashion, between the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Noughties, had a key character that embodied its spirit and told the tale: journalist Anna Piaggi, living witness of that contamination between art, society and culture that changed fashion and sanctioned its success on a global scale. The daughter of a manager for La Rinascente (Milan's iconic high-end shopping mall whose foundation goes back to 1865), Karl Lagerfeld's muse, "a poet with her clothes" in the words of Bill Cunningham, her life is retraced through interviews with designers (Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Stephen Jones, Manolo Blahnik, and more) together with archival images from four decades of fashion history.

Painted by Picasso in 1937, Guernica is a universal icon against the war. In 2014, the artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi conceived a new film that tells the history of 20th century upon the painting. In 2023, years after Angela’s passing, Yervant accomplishes this task.

A principal and teacher conspire to protect their students from an invisible predator lurking inside their school. Based on a true story.

Returning from a dinner party with friends, a young couple finds themselves locked outside their house, and have to deal with the remains of their relationship.

An inconceivable and devastating epidemic spread without apparent remedy, causing two lovers to painfully divide, while the social and political life crumbles all over the world.

The decades-long story of a monumental container of utopias: the former Marchiondi-Spagliardi Institute, located in the western suburbs of Milan.