Francesca Archibugi

Secrets Secrets

Young terrorist Laura shoots both a judge and a comrade, and over time her violent act becomes a thread linking the lives and fates of several other women. Each has her own secret, including the lawyer who listens to Laura as if in a ‘trance’: moments before, she discovered her husband was cheating.

The Leisure Seeker

A runaway couple go on an unforgettable journey from Boston to Key West, recapturing their passion for life and their love for each other on a road trip that provides revelation and surprise right up to the very end.

With Closed Eyes

In the Tuscan countryside at the end of the 19th century, Pietro, the shy son of a tyrannical landowner, falls in love with Ghisola, a peasant girl with no family. His father has her sent away. Years later, the two meet again: still in love with her, Pietro would like to marry her, but she has become the mistress of a married man.

Opera Prima

Opera Prima is a tribute and a journey through the evolution that cinema has had in Italy. Tayu Vlietstra, a pupil of Bertolucci, carries out an investigation on the first work of six of the most authoritative and beloved Italian directors. The result is an unpublished and precious document that reveals the emotions and expectations of directors grappling with their cinematic debut. Mario Monicelli, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmüller, Marco Bellocchio, Liliana Cavani and Francesca Archibugi offer a still current evolution on the needs and difficulties of making cinema in our country.

Mignon Has Left

With her father on trial, 15-year-old Mignon leaves Paris to stay with her Italian relatives. The rather prim, snooty teen at first struggles to fit in with the more earthy Forbicioni family, each with their own problems. Eventually she bonds with her lovestruck little cousin Giorgio—who'll learn important life lessons over the course of his summer with Mignon.

The Great Pumpkin

An epileptic 12-year-old girl, Pippi, is hospitalized in the psychiatric ward instead of the neurological ward, due to an administration error. Out of this mistake begins the difficult journey towards being cured.

The Hummingbird

Everyone in Marco's life seems constantly restless, from his brilliant but unhappily married parents to his own wife Marina, or even Luisa, the real love of his life, a girl he met during a fateful summer in the '70s and always stayed in touch with. Tragedy and fate seem to haunt him, yet he somehow manages never to get ensnared in the chaos—like his namesake, “the hummingbird”, he focuses all his energy at standing still.

Magical Nights

Rome, 1990. The night Italy's national football team is eliminated from the World Cup by Argentina on penalty kicks, a well-known film producer is found dead in the Tiber river. The main suspects for the murder are three young aspiring screenwriters, who–promptly taken to the police–start to tell their version of the story.

Secrets Secrets

Young terrorist Laura shoots both a judge and a comrade, and over time her violent act becomes a thread linking the lives and fates of several other women. Each has her own secret, including the lawyer who listens to Laura as if in a ‘trance’: moments before, she discovered her husband was cheating.

The Leisure Seeker

A runaway couple go on an unforgettable journey from Boston to Key West, recapturing their passion for life and their love for each other on a road trip that provides revelation and surprise right up to the very end.

With Closed Eyes

In the Tuscan countryside at the end of the 19th century, Pietro, the shy son of a tyrannical landowner, falls in love with Ghisola, a peasant girl with no family. His father has her sent away. Years later, the two meet again: still in love with her, Pietro would like to marry her, but she has become the mistress of a married man.

Opera Prima

Opera Prima is a tribute and a journey through the evolution that cinema has had in Italy. Tayu Vlietstra, a pupil of Bertolucci, carries out an investigation on the first work of six of the most authoritative and beloved Italian directors. The result is an unpublished and precious document that reveals the emotions and expectations of directors grappling with their cinematic debut. Mario Monicelli, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmüller, Marco Bellocchio, Liliana Cavani and Francesca Archibugi offer a still current evolution on the needs and difficulties of making cinema in our country.

Mignon Has Left

With her father on trial, 15-year-old Mignon leaves Paris to stay with her Italian relatives. The rather prim, snooty teen at first struggles to fit in with the more earthy Forbicioni family, each with their own problems. Eventually she bonds with her lovestruck little cousin Giorgio—who'll learn important life lessons over the course of his summer with Mignon.

The Great Pumpkin

An epileptic 12-year-old girl, Pippi, is hospitalized in the psychiatric ward instead of the neurological ward, due to an administration error. Out of this mistake begins the difficult journey towards being cured.

The Hummingbird

Everyone in Marco's life seems constantly restless, from his brilliant but unhappily married parents to his own wife Marina, or even Luisa, the real love of his life, a girl he met during a fateful summer in the '70s and always stayed in touch with. Tragedy and fate seem to haunt him, yet he somehow manages never to get ensnared in the chaos—like his namesake, “the hummingbird”, he focuses all his energy at standing still.

Magical Nights

Rome, 1990. The night Italy's national football team is eliminated from the World Cup by Argentina on penalty kicks, a well-known film producer is found dead in the Tiber river. The main suspects for the murder are three young aspiring screenwriters, who–promptly taken to the police–start to tell their version of the story.

Like Crazy

Two mental patients with opposite personalities ditch their Tuscan hospital and embark on an unpredictable exploration of the real world.

Dry

In Rome it hasn’t rained for three years and the lack of water is overturning rules and habits. Through the city dying of thirst and prohibitions moves a chorus of people, young and old, marginalised and successful, victims and profiteers. Their lives are linked in a single design, while each seeks his or her deliverance.

An Italian Name

Paolo is an outgoing and handsome real estate broker married to Simona, a beautiful woman from the rough outskirts of Rome who has become an author of spicy bestsellers and is pregnant with their child. Betta, Paolo’s sister and her husband Sandro organise a dinner party with Paolo, Simona and their childhood friend, the eccentric musician Claudio. During the lively gathering Paolo reveals what he would like to name his son, causing reactions to steam up and a torrent of revelations to follow reaching climactic proportions.

Renzo e Lucia

Loose adaptation of Italy's national epic, Alessandro Manzoni's “The Betrothed”. In war-torn 17th century Italy, shady feudal lord Don Rodrigo eyes young and beautiful Lucia, who loves—and is reciprocated by—commoner Renzo. The two lovers plan to marry in secret, but Rodrigo discovers it and they are forced to flee their village, becoming separated and each facing many dangers, including the Plague.

Lezioni di volo

A pair of teen friends – known as "Chicken & Curry" because they are virtually inseparable – fail their high school finals and try to cover it by claiming that Curry is in the midst of an identity crisis that can only be solved by a visit to his ancestral homeland, India. While the ruse works wonderfully on their parents, this impromptu journey of self-discovery takes an unexpected detour when Curry locates his biological sister and remains captivated by the country he first despised, and Chicken falls for an older doctor working for Médecins Sans Frontières.

Illusione

Perugia. The police are carrying away the body of a young woman when they hear a sigh: Rosa Lazar is still alive. The assistant district attorney Cristina Camponeschi and psychologist Stefano Mangiaboschi investigate, but Rosa seems unaware of the attack she has endured and hides the truth. For Cristina, the girl is the key to an international crime ring; for Stefano, the start of an inner journey that will lead him to reveal the true enigma of Rosa Lazar.

A Matter of Heart

Garage owner Angelo and big-time film producer Alberto find themselves occupying neighbouring beds in a Rome hospital after suffering heart attacks. Alberto is a gregarious joker - and chain smoker - who has a strong effect on the impressionable Angelo. However, as one of the men's condition deteriorates, the other becomes more deeply involved in his personal life.

Ten Minutes

Ten minutes a day can change the course of your day. Ten minutes doing something completely new can change the course of a life. This is what Bianca will discover in the midst of an existential crisis. New meetings, the discovery of special bonds and listening to those who have always loved us. Sometimes it doesn't take much to start over and this film teaches us this, through a warm and passionate story of rebirth.

The Wicked

At the beginning of the 20th century, a junior resident takes an interest in a newly-arrived patient, a young Italian woman who has mysteriously developed schizophrenia. To identify the causes of her condition, he employs psychoanalytic methods to dig into her sexual past, despite objections by the old-fashioned chief physician.

Shooting the Moon

14-year-old Siddharta, wise beyond his age, has to deal every day with his heroin-addict mother Silvia and an absent father. One day, his four-year-old sister Domitilla accidentally pricks her finger on one of Silvia's used needles without her noticing. Seeking advice on the Internet, Siddharta is told to have her tested for hepatitis and AIDS. Thus he embarks on a odyssey of medical bureaucracy and both kind and uncaring adults.

Vivere

In a respectable suburb made up of row houses, Luca Attorre — a freelance journalist who struggles to get his features published in the papers — is unable to maintain Susi, a ballerina reduced to teaching dance to overweight women, and Lucilla, their quiet and imaginative six-year- old daughter who suffers from severe bronchial asthma. They are helped economically by Pierpaolo, Luca’s seventeen-year-old son from a previous relationship. Pierpaolo lives in an Art Nouveau house with his mother and grandfather, an important trial lawyer of cases linked to politics who rakes in several million euros a year. In the setting of a magnificent and incomprehensible Rome, both a good mother and a bad one, Mary Ann, a deeply Catholic student of art history from Ireland, au pair for the little Lucilla, is caught in the middle.

Couch Potatoes

Giorgio and Tito, father and son. A successful journalist and a lazy teenager apparently impossible to understand. Giorgio's dream is to take Tito to the Nasca Hill in Liguria, but Tito prefers to spend his entire day with his group of friends, eating, talking about nothing and playing video games. Until one day when he suddenly informs his father that he would join him in this trip. After a series of accidents and misunderstandings, at the end, somehow father and son will find the way to communicate … or at least they will try.

The Belt

Vittorio, an American novelist teaching in Rome, meets the beautiful but damaged Bianca and they rapidly fall into an urgent, tempestuous affair. He's hesitant over their relationship since she seems to thrive on conflict and is constantly baiting him into physical altercation. Bianca gives Vittorio an exquisite leather belt as a gift; he knows immediately that she wants him to whip her with it. Driven by his craving for her, Vittorio complies to Bianca's desire. Their relationship escalates into a dark realm of S&M which becomes more and more self-destructive.

Towards Evening

Italy, 1977. Professor Bruschi is a retired widower who lives according to a strict routine he set for himself. An ardent old-style communist, he has always been at odds with the unconventional lifestyle led by his son and his hippieish girlfriend Stella. When their four-year-old daughter is left in his care out of the blue after the two break up, the old professor becomes a sort of father figure to the girl, growing fond of her. However he's once again challenged when Stella also arrives for a stay in his elegant villa, reclaiming custody of her daughter.

Parole povere

“I approached Pierluigi Cappello when he became my bedside table companion. We didn’t know each other, but were already intimate. His poems are full of images, I might even have dreamt some. I didn’t know anything about his personal life, about the motorcycle accident when he was sixteen, and that he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. There’s no trace of it in the poems: in his verses Pierluigi runs, and sometimes he flies.”

Tomorrow

This ensemble drama details the friendships that grow between survivors of the 1997 Umbria earthquake. The townsfolk—adults, children and foreigners alike—deal with various issues as they try to resume normal lives in a homeless situation.

The Story

Ida, a single mother of two sons, hides her Jewish heritage and fights against poverty and persecution during the end of World War II and post-war Rome.

Renzo e Lucia

Loose adaptation of Italy's national epic, Alessandro Manzoni's “The Betrothed”. In war-torn 17th century Italy, shady feudal lord Don Rodrigo eyes young and beautiful Lucia, who loves—and is reciprocated by—commoner Renzo. The two lovers plan to marry in secret, but Rodrigo discovers it and they are forced to flee their village, becoming separated and each facing many dangers, including the Plague.

A Family Tale