The Cormorants

Isabelle is an astronomer of French origin who lives in Italy in a large house surrounded by vineyards in the hills near Trieste. The sun shines on the countryside, the sea breaks on the rocky coast a few kilometers away, the landscape is paradise, and like every summer, her son Jérome will spend some time with her. Isabelle loves him very much and is ready to do anything for him, but her encounter with Davide, a young man going through a very difficult time, will turn their lives upside down. Isabelle will then have to make a choice that will inevitably lead to a painful outcome.

Antonio and his son Pietro are in Milan to fight Pietro's brain cancer. Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Jaber, an immigrant from North Africa, lives in Milan and assists his best friend at the hospital. Antonio and Jaber, two lonely souls both fighting their own battles, connect at the hospital.

A naked woman awakes on a deserted beach. After wandering around, she ends up in the ruins of an abandoned town. The living left long ago. In a tumbledown house she finds artefacts of existence: clothing, furniture, a record player and a telephone. The latter contains a young couple’s photos and videos. Arianna and Leonardo loved taking selfies and meticulously recorded their holidays and excursions, but also their intimate moments at home.

La vida sublime tells the story of a grandson who finds the passion he seeks in the character of his dead grandfather, «El Cuco», and the trip his grandfather made as a youth to southern Spain in the early 1940s. A trip that should have remained a family mystery. The South and his grandfather open up a fascinating new world, a space in which a personal memory that immortalizes «El Cuco» can be created. A tribute by a grandson to the lost generation of the Franco dictatorship era, one which was not able to fulfill its dreams. A quest for the myth, and the sublime. A new writing of family history. A film that deals with the issue of borders. Borders between North and South, imagination and reality, present and past, grandfathers and grandsons, Spain and America, madness and lucidity

At the end of the winter, Flaminio, a resistant shepherd, prepares materially and spiritually for the arrival of the spring through daily rituals, using the tools he built for himself: he moves and sows the ground, shears the sheep and makes a woolen suit for the new season. The communities of the valley chase the winter away with cowbells and bonfires through the ritual of Scasada dol Zenerù, which is inserted into the story of the shepherd’s life as a dreamlike element that draws on an ancestral memory. Flaminio’s sensitivity, strongly connected to Nature, allows him to perceive when it is time to call the community to act, starting the ritual.

Life on the edge of a boy and a woman meet and unite, for a moment, among the rubble and solitude of one of the largest discotheques in Europe of the 1990s: Last Empire. Here, between the fog and the cold, the warmth of humanity seems to have almost disappeared, in the silence and in the spaces that, years before, had hosted the nights of a passionate youth.

On her last day at the diner, Sara prepares to leave the city. Denis watches her, trying to hold on to what they both fear losing. In a crystallised, suspended landscape, their goodbye reveals the depth of their bond and the poignant intensity of severance.

Three months in the life of Chiara, an actress pushing forty and trying to find her way in a bustling Rome overrun by tourists. Invisible, precarious, Chiara restlessly piles up one experience after another, searching for the thing that will make her feel alive.

A year along the Italian cableway on the Mont Blanc massif. The machine, the workers, and the users are represented as the main actors. While depicting the everyday routines and the behavior of the sightseers, the film explores the relationship between technology, tourism and mountaineering, cities and modernity, observation and image, representation and experience.

Ascoli Satriano, Apulia. A small town in the internal areas, depopulated as one would expect. A place of “there’s nothing here”, as everybody tells Eleonora when she arrives in the town after spending most of her life in Milan, a place of “there’s everything there”, where her parents moved in the Sixties. She is emigrant, but not for her choice. A second-generation emigrant. Always being separated from this “here” she could never know, but that has always been in her mind in an image made by stories told by others. Eleonora goes down to the town in order to provide images to other’s words: those by her family and those by Adele, the kid from the town met during the only visit Eleonora made with her parents when she was very little. Adele wrote letters for years and Eleonora rarely replied. Eleonora starts today an impossible conversation with Adele: a conversation disconnected from a synchronized time and localized in a largely imaginary space.

Three characters in search of their existence and their place in the world. A film that looks at art, literature and cinema.

Nina wakes up restless in the middle of the night, wanders around the house and accidentally steps on a spider. Her father tells her that its death will bring bad luck. The next day Nina goes on a trip to the sea with her mother and other children. Among the dunes of the beach she will realize what is troubling her.