The Girl with the Leica

Filmaker Alina Marazzi assembles old home movies trying to piece together the life of her mother, Liseli, who committed suicide when Alina was seven years old.

Antonio is a fallen angel, a rootless chauffeur who relates only to the lonely heroes in the science fiction novels he grew up with. Only through a chance meeting with Maria, a woman struggling to hold onto her daughter and her business, does he discover a hope that's been in his detached existence.

The film looks again at recent events from a female point of view, through the first-hand accounts provided by the diaries of three women. Rather than focusing on the alleged objectivity of facts, the film gives space to a chorus of voices that narrate those events in first person, visually supported by archival footage of the period, drawn from the most varied sources - institutional, public, militant and private. Anita, Teresa and Valentina come from different Italian regions and different social backgrounds, but share the same feelings: they no longer feel as part of a society based on the patriarchal family, on the power of "husbands" and on the supremacy of males, which requires them to be efficient mothers, obedient wives and virtuous daughters.

Per Sempre (Forever) examines the reasons that spur certain women to choose a religious life within a monastic community. The film starts with the fundamental question that prompts the film director to confront this reality: how is it possible, today, for a woman to make an extreme and permanent choice, one that will last forever?

Pauline, a beguiling woman in her 60s, returns to her hometown, Turin, for the first time since she was ten years old. She has inherited her aunt’s apartment in town. In Turin Pauline contacts Dr. Angela Gualtieri, a psychologist whom she had met abroad some time before; Angela runs a maternity centre, the Melograno, a support centre where both mothers to be and young mothers with post natal depression seek help. At the Melograno they are constantly short of help, that’s why Angela asks Pauline to give her a hand in setting up an in-house archive collecting different material relating to maternity: video interviews to new mothers, mothers diaries, photo portraits of mother and child. Pauline accepts and starts her work plunging deep in an emotional material that touches her strongly: the controversial feelings experienced by women in their relation with the child.

The Istituto Luce turned ninety in 2014, its decades-long history intertwined with that of Italy itself, through cinema and that unique treasure trove of images known to all as the Luce Archives. To celebrate its anniversary, some of the most acclaimed rising filmmakers in Italy were invited to make a small film, with each director selecting ten minutes of footage from the archives, out of the thousands of hours of footage to be found there. The result is an album full of different narratives.

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.

14Reels is a collective film in Super 8, where 14 directors in 14 cities around the world have filmed and edited in camera one reel each on the theme of the city.