The Belt

Eleven Italian filmmakers show in eleven segments the terrible conditions of the Palestinian people living in Jerusalem.

The story of the friendship between Ioan and Michele respectively Romanian and Italian. The serendipitous encounter of two worlds apart: the travails of a young man, son of the Post-Communist Revolution, who flees his country in search of a better future and the travails of another youth who instead scrapes along the margins of a Western society that is unable to offer gainful employment to so much of its youth. In the background of this rapport between a simple Romanian youth and his marginalized Italian counterpart, there is a West which on one side is still reeling from the collapse of the Communist ideology and on the other, in the clutches of a Capitalist myth which has increasingly assumed, as it propulsive force, harsh competitiveness and an intensification of social inequality.

A wife escapes her pressure-filled marriage only to have her husband haunt her literally and figuratively.

A young girl witnesses her mother having sex with the family dog. When her father finds out, he burns the dog alive. She is so traumatized by these incidents that she later turns into a nymphomaniac. She moves to an island and lives there with her own dog, having sex with various guests who visit her.

Irma, Eugenia, Miranda and Rina are four different women, each with their own character, their own weaknesses and their own eccentricities, but linked by a deep and lasting knowledge over time, united and marked by their essential card games. When they decide to participate in a national buraco tournament and get out of their everyday life, they will suddenly find themselves with their cards exposed. Life always offers a second chance and love can go back to upsetting at any age. After all, it is the game of burraco that has taught him that a game must be played completely, to the end, and that no result is ever taken for granted.