Lorenzo Degl'Innocenti

In 1588, a castaway from the Spanish Armada, sent from Portugal by Philip II of Spain to conquer England, is captured on an Irish beach. There he is tried, declared guilty and hanged to death. All of this would be reasonable according to the laws of war and hatred among humans. The problem is the prisoner is a monkey.

Two men meet secretly each week in an Italian flat to struggle with their feelings for each other and to wrestle.

What rela­tion­ship does a Span­ish chess play­er have with the most famous world cham­pi­on in chess his­to­ry, the dic­ta­tor­ship of Gen­er­al Fran­co and the silent strike of Asturi­an min­ers with racial repres­sion in the USA and Mal­colm X, the mis­sile cri­sis of Cuba and a chess game played in Stock­holm in 1962. Per­haps all these his­tor­i­cal events have noth­ing to do, or per­haps every­thing has a strange connection.

Ivan has worked has a butcher all his life. His dream is to have a furniture shop, but he isn't sure he is brave enough to change now. The Butcher's is an old family tradition and has been passed from generation to generation, and it weighs on Ivan like destiny itself. He has a daily routine: a machine-like customer service, yet, on his free time, he starts to draw furniture involuntarily. As time goes by he wants to make more and more sketches but keeps getting interrupted by his costumers. The more he urges to draw, the more often he gets interrupted. The more he gets interrupted, the more frustrated he becomes. Ivan starts to project his displeasure on his customers until the day he decides to solve the matter.

Don Matteo is a thoroughly ordinary Catholic priest with an extraordinary ability to read people and solve crimes. He’s a parish priest who never met an unjustly accused person he didn’t want to help.