Troubling Love

The classic opera about falling into and out of love, friendship, and loss. Mimi and the poet Rudolfo, the painter Marcello and Musetta are the lovers; the musician Schaunard and philosopher Colline round out the set of friends living life rather close to the edge in Paris' Left Bank.

Many communities were founded to improve the world in the second half of the last century. India with its enormous historic potential of celebrated spirituality and a generous attitude to other life forms, became the home to many of these communes seeking meaning. The 2,200 members of the 'Auroville' community in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu have turned their back on the capitalist way.

The life of a dying young man at the short age of only forty-one after playing the lead in Il postino. He was a brilliant stage actor before becoming an astonishing film director.

In early 20th-century Naples, a theatrical parody lands beloved thespian and playwright Eduardo Scarpetta in court, facing a malicious lawsuit that could compromise his freedom of expression and the economic security of his extended family—including his son's, young Eduardo De Filippo.

The famos Double Feature of Verismo at La Scala with Daniel Harding conducting from February 2011

Rome, Esquilino, summer. Rossella returns to Rome after years of absence and returns to her home, rented to her friend Salvatore, the set designer. The woman is gripped by an evident depression and wanders around the city that she does not recognize and that no longer recognizes her. People have changed and Rossella finds no one capable of answering the obsessive question that has plagued her for some time: "How can I disappear?"

Felice returns to his native Rione Sanità in Naples to look after his dying mother, having lived abroad for the last forty years. Here he discovers that his old friend Oreste has become a notorious crimeboss.

In 19th-century Italy, Giacomo Leopardi channels his debilitating illness and isolation into poetry.

Naples, 1959. Pure Mathematics professor Renato Caccioppoli, Bakunin's grandson, is a tortured soul. Recently discharged from the psychiatric hospital, left by his wife, and increasingly disillusioned with academia and the Communist Party, he lives his last days with painful detachment.

1828. After witnessing the brutal repression of revolutions in monarchist South, three young friends join Giuseppe Mazzini's patriotic cause, seeking to finally unify Italy under a republican government. Their idealism will clash with the inevitable disillusionment as they grow apart over the following decades.

Rome. The 1980s. After the magnum opus The Art of Joy she has been working on for a decade is rejected by the Italian publishing world, writer Goliarda Sapienza commits a desperate theft that costs her her reputation and social position. Incarcerated in Italy’s largest female prison, she finds herself living alongside thieves, junkies, sex workers and revolutionaries. After her release, she continues to meet with these women and over the course of a sweltering summer, a life-changing relationship flowers – a relationship that will reawaken her the desire to live and to write.

In 1914, with Italy on the cusp of joining World War I, a group of foreign artists establishes a commune on the rural island of Capri, catching the attention of young Lucia, a local illiterate shepherdess who soon falls under their spell.

Five Neapolitan directors depict life in the city under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius for this anthology film of comedy, drama, surrealism, and political commentary.

Antonio Barracano is a respected figure among the Neapolitan underworld, keeping order and administering justice according to his own criteria, beyond the law. One day he's faced with a dilemma after a youth asks him permission to kill his father.

Successful illustrator Daniele Mallarico travels to Naples to look after his four-year-old grand-son while his daughter is away for a few days. What begins as a simple babysitting job turns into a subtle psychological duel, as the child’s boundless imagination slowly unsettles him. Trapped together in the apartment, Daniele is forced to confront something far more disturbing than a mischievous child: the fear of aging and the loss of creativity. Through this strange encounter, he may rediscover the power of imagination he thought he had lost.

A couple of bourgeois intellectuals, Carlo and Silvia, have been married for twenty years. While she lives in their flat in Rome, he spends most of his time in the country house where he writes his books, openly living with his younger lover, Lù. In return, Carlo has long accepted that her wife may have lovers, but her volatile relationship with a young neo-fascist suddenly rekindles his jealousy.