The Dream and the Violence

Documentary by D.Gaglianone

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.

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.

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.

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)

The Resistance, an ancient theme. Almost always approached from a realistic, if not documentary, perspective. Yet memory reworks in a fantastic, sometimes sinister, way all kinds of memories, even dramas. It is from this point of view that first-time director Daniele Gaglianone (34) approached the subject, despite his deep historical knowledge of the period (he has been working with the National Archive of the Resistance for years). In an interior, rather than intimate key: two old men meet by chance the fascist hierarch responsible for a terrible massacre, and they do not know whether to forgive or avenge. The past then mixes with the present, up to a third dimension that becomes a real character, in the finale: the decision made by the two will turn out to be unsuccessful and then, in order not to "die," the old men will build a perverse inner game capable of remedying every pain...

Studying to become a teacher in 1950s Northern Italy, Sicilian immigrant Pietro is joined by his big brother Giovanni. Pietro shows considerable promise in his field, prompting illiterate Giovanni to take on even the toughest jobs in order to support his sibling's academic pursuits.

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.

An Italian documentary about No Tav movement.

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.

A story of friendship in a squalid suburb of a city of southern Italy. Alexander and Ferdi come from poor families and live in a city in decline, where there is no future.

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

A portrait in seven fragments of Paolo Gobetti, an eclectic figure who, amid his tireless activity in Italian cinema and cultural landscape, founded the National Film Archive of Resistance (Archivio nazionale cinematografico della Resistenza, ANCR).

Alberto, Francesco, and Mariella live in Carbonia. Their childhoods and youth were filmed on Super 8 and then stored away in an old box. Now, in a cinema, they will watch those images again after many years. Through three intertwining stories, the film explores the evolution of a country that experienced the rapid economic growth of the 1980s, feminist struggles, and the simple yet secure life of the old working class.