Cake in the Sky

Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.

A day in Rome viewed by sixteen different directors under the supervision of the great screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.

Rossini, history teacher and son of another professor, for his liberal ideas refuses to sign the oath of allegiance to the the fascist regime that Mussolini imposed on the professors university. After a period of imprisonment he is so assigned to confinement on an island. Here the young intellectual finds himself in contact with the composite humanity that populated the places of confinement: militiamen, agents, common and political coercion, villagers. The figure of the director of the colony, the commissioner Rizzuto, stands out among all, who was a pupil of his father, and for whom he continues to have feelings of esteem and devotion.

Antonio Gramsci, sentenced to twenty years in prison by the fascist tribunals, relives the stages of his political career and private life.

An expressionist and hypnotic vision of a disconcerting rural ritual in Lucania, the symbolic slaughter of a goat, a collaboration between Mangini and her husband and partner Lino Del Fra.

Fata Morgana is the train that arrives in Milan coming from the south of Italy. It is the train of the “southern” migrants. They arrive with packages, luggage, wives, children, in the hope of the economic boom. But there is no place for them and the city pushes them to the periphery. Few manage to find work, but new men keep coming every day.

A village in Calabria still follows ancient customs in which young women must secretly wait for a log to be dragged to their doorstep in a symbolic declaration of love. Lino Del Fra reflects on how the weight of traditions exercises social control over love and family relationships.