The Stolen Children

The Little Archimedes

The action takes place in Florence in the 1930s. Alfred, an Englishman who moved to that city in order to write a book on Giotto, meets a boy who is fond of music and mathematics, with whom he becomes close friends. Alfred goes to Switzerland, but one day he receives an anguished letter from the boy and rushes back to Florence where he learns some terrible news.

Special Effects

A horror film director, now forgotten, invites a young author who wrote the screenplay for a film, “Effetti speciali”. As long as he is remembered, the director is willing to do anything.

Open Doors

Tommaso Scalia is a man who commits three murders: he kills his superior who sacked him, the man who replaced him and his wife. He wants a quick trial and an early execution, but an earnest, principled assistant judge looks for a way to save the murderer from being shot, because he does not belive in capital punishment.

Lord of the Ants

Based on true events of the late 60s in Italy, poet, playwright and myrmecologist Aldo Braibanti is prosecuted and sentenced to prison for the love he shares with his barely-of-age pupil and friend, Ettore. Amidst a chorus of voices of accusers, supporters and a largely hypocritical public, a single committed journalist takes on the task of piecing together the truth, between secrecy and desire, facing suspicion and censorship in the process.

Lamerica

Fiore, an Italian conman, arrives in post Communist Albania with Gino, his young apprentice, to set up a shoe factory that will never open. The con requires a native Albanian, so they designate Spiro, an impoverished and confused former political prisoner as chairman of the board. When Fiore returns to Italy to get government funds for the project, Spiro unexpectedly disappears and Gino sets out on a journey to find him. The search leads him to discover Spiro's tragic personal history and witness Albanian poverty firsthand.

The Cinema According to Bertolucci

Documentary on the filming of Novecento by Bernardo Bertolucci

The Seven Cervi Brothers

The story of the Cervi family. Rural farmers brought up to be idealogically opposed to fascism during the era of Mussolini's rule of Italy and World War 2.

The Way We Laughed

Studying to become a teacher in 1950s Northern Italy, Sicilian immigrant Pietro is joined by his big brother Giovanni. Pietro shows considerable promise in his field, prompting illiterate Giovanni to take on even the toughest jobs in order to support his sibling's academic pursuits.

The Missing Star

Vincenzo, former head of maintenance of a steel plant that's been outsourced, travels from Italy to China to warn about a defective blast furnace.

The Keys to the House

Meeting his handicapped son for the first time, a young father attempts to forge a relationship with the teenager.

Blow to the Heart

The son of a university professor discovers his father's secret life and has to decide what to do about it.

The First Man

Based on a novel that Albert Camus was working on when he died, we follow Jacques Comery as he travels back to Algeria in 1957, a place full of childhood memories. The country is split between those wanting to remain a part of France, and those demanding independence. Reminiscences of his mother, his stern grandmother and a young Arab boy come flooding back.

Via Panisperna Boys

The enthusiasms, fears, joys and disappointments of the (private and professional) life of a well-known group of boys fond of physics and mathematics, who just made history as the Via Panisperna boys.

Battlefield

These are the years of the First World War and Dr. Stefano Zorzi spends his days in the Exemption Clinic in a large city of Northern Italy, where he not only takes care of soldiers who arrive from the massacre of the front, but also he fights simulation and self-harm of those who hope to be dispensed, by sending them before the Military Court. If Stefano, in fact, does his utmost to heal soldiers and send them back to fight, Dr. Giulio Farradio makes them ill, or helps them to self-injure seriously enough to be exonerated. The two doctors, who went to university together and were great friends, they not only (secretly) challenge each other on a professional level, but also on the sentimental one: they are both linked to Anna, a courageous nurse with a strong character. But when the great ‘Spanish’ fever epidemic arrived in 1918, the time for love, politics and science ends up getting confused dangerously...

Tenderness

Back from the hospital where he has been treated after a heart attack, Lorenzo is on his way upstairs to his top-floor apartment in Naples when he meets Michela. The charming young woman, who has just moved to the facing apartment, has forgotten her keys and finds herself locked out. Cynical and grumpy, the retired lawyer who has been living estranged from the rest of the world, should normally leave her to her fate but he mellows under her spontaneous charm. He helps her, becomes friends not only with her but with her husband Fabio and their two children. For once, the self-declared misanthropist seems to be experiencing the long forgotten feeling of empathy.

Happy to Be Different

The film takes us on a voyage to a hidden Italy rarely addressed on film: Gay Italy as it was lived in the 20th century, from the turn of the century up to the 80s. The documentary gives voice to those who personally had to bear the weight of being "different", remembering how their lives were shaped by this situation during Fascism and in the aftermath of World War II, in an anthropologically and culturally widely diverse nation. Theirs is a mixed testimony of repression, censorship, dignity, courage, and happiness, making way for the final image of a world - our world - that still has a long way to go towards respect and liberty for everyone.

Hostile Territory

Former P.O.W. Jack Calgrove moves Heaven and Earth to be reunited with his children following the Civil War. After returning home, Jack discovers that his wife has tragically died and his children, presumed to be orphans, are heading deep into the West on a train crossing enemy lines, with the intent of being placed into new homes. Calgrove and another soldier team up with a troop of Native American sharpshooters and a freed slave as they try to stop the train.

My Life as a Zucchini

After his mother’s death, Zucchini is befriended by a kind police officer, Raymond, who accompanies him to his new foster home filled with other orphans his age. There, with the help of his newfound friends, Zucchini eventually learns to trust and love as he searches for a new family of his own.