The City’s Unknown

"Regina Coeli" is the nickname with which inmates call Regina, voluntary assistant in Rome's Rebibbia jail, very involved in solidarity but lonely in his private life. The jail director entrusts her with the task to try re-educating Graziano, a young Sardinian sentenced for a kidnapping of which he always proclaimed himself to be innocent. Regina is way too much mature and lonely not to feel intrigued by the mysterious personality of the illiterate shepherd, who expresses himself only in his almost unintelligible Sardinian dialect.

Roman township of San Basilio: Fabio, 7 years old, in Italian a "character", is assigned to a differential class. How the family reacts, what the neighbors say, what the teachers, the principal, the psychologist of the elementary school think: the doubt is that there is no re-education of a child at stake, but the green light for social homologation.

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.

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.

On a hot summer day, a group of boys of the Roman suburbs play and laugh in one of the many rivers that surround the city. The camera scrutinizes them, approaches them, reveals the gestures and glances, wraps them in a sort of visual dance, while the words of the commentary (entrusted to the poetic sensibility of Pier Paolo Pasolini) narrate the stories, desires, dreams, the future.

"Il mondo a scatti" is a film that intertwines images of today and yesterday, still images and moving images through a dialogue between two people who reflect on the visible and invisible things of the world: Cecilia Mangini, unstoppable ninety years old, photographer, documentary maker, screenwriter is filmed by Paolo Pisanelli, photographer, director, curator of cultural events.

This documentary is one of the earliest film enquiries on women's condition in Italy, seen in its different aspects: social, economic, psychological. Starting from an analysis of the feminine role models proposed by the cultural industry, the film finds its protagonists among all kinds of women.

A unique 1960s documentary on the traditional dirge sung by women in Griko, an ancient dialect of Salento, so old that it originates from the ancient Greeks who once colonized that part of southern Italy.

Initial panorama of Brindisi, a city with a peasant tradition. The petrochemical, city within a city. Children in poor neighborhoods, workers' voices: the crisis, the layoffs, the need for the recommendations of the Christian Democrats to enter Montecatini. Wealthy men and women binge at the restaurant. Voices of agrarians, forced to leave the earth to make room for the petrochemical. A ballroom. In a puppet theater, a show is staged in which the worker is addressed as "starved". At a course for foremost workers, various compliant testimonies follow one another: Monteshell is a large industry, and no one has any criticisms against it. But another worker, elsewhere, with his face in the shadows, confesses that everyone is afraid to speak, skilled workers get the same pay as simple ones, 400 colleagues have been fired, union activists are "special supervised", and going on strike is a business. 35mm b/w

A day in the life of Maria, an old woman who lives on a farm in Puglia. She is not afraid of death, the gestures and actions that fill her days give meaning to time.

The film begins at night, as parishioners holding lanterns form a series of processions, travelling through the night from Rome, and villages in the Abruzzi and Lazio regions, to make it to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, 10 miles from the capital, by morning. More than an anthropological study of ecstatic devotion – with its genuflecting disciples, and women who scream desperately at the sky – Divino Amore also speaks to Mangini’s interest in disappearing rituals and communities at risk of extinction. When generations of worshippers pour out of the church at the end of the service, formality dissolves into secular leisure, as families perched on horse carts eat plates of spaghetti and men fall asleep on the grass. The velvet-clad austerity of the church’s interior gives way to a series of pastoral tableaux.

The industrial city of Brindisi is the setting for this film, the tension between the bright promises of the industrial world and the not-so-bright reality of a young worker, in one of Mangini's most emblematic works.

Juste wanders the streets of Paris looking for people only he can see. He collects their last memory before helping them into the afterlife. One day Agathe, a young woman, recognizes him. She belongs to his previous life. She is alive and he is a ghost. How will they manage to love each other and seize this second chance?

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.