The Ice Builders

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.

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.

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.

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.

A nocturnal voyage into the bowels of the Earth. The camera follows the work of a machine that is digging tunnels for new underground railway lines. A short film that starts from the darkness to slowly approach the light, when the last fragment of rock falls and the workers’ eternal night comes to an end. A film that shows the inextricable bond between man and machine.

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.

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.

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

"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

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.

Fourteen-year-old Alessandro navigates an ambiguous friendship with Filippo and his attraction to Lena, a Croatian girl, discovering desire and identity during one suspended night between childhood innocence and adolescent turmoil.

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.

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.

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.

Monte Amiata is a residential complex in the Gallaratese neighbourhood in Milan, designed by architects Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi at the end of the 1960s. It was created with the intention of representing a parallel microcosm, a sort of alternative city of the future. In referring to its unusual colour and shape, its inhabitants call it the red dinosaur.