Italian

Exiled from the USSR, consummate film poet Tarkovsky poured his stirrings of homesickness into this spectrally beautiful, metaphysical exploration of spiritual isolation and Russian identity. While researching the turbulent life of a 17th-century composer in the perpetually mist-shrouded Tuscan countryside, a soul-sick Russian poet (Yankvosky) forms an unusual kinship with an apocalypse-obsessed local madman (Josephson). Tarkovsky evokes the textures of dreams and memories through ravishing monochrome and sepia-toned reveries and flashbacks, while conjuring the hushed and haunted tone of a trance in this late-career masterwork.Read More »

A boy from the country, shy and naïf, falls in love with a mysterious and violent girl that introduces him to pain, building a relationship that will make them face together the secret she’s hiding: her mother’s illness.Read More »

Sabina has a regular life. She is satisfied with her job and her love for Franco. Lately nightmares start disturbing her, and almost in the same time she discovers to be pregnant. Step by step she remembers her childhood spent within a severe middle-class family. But a big secret is hidden within her heart. Sabina wants to contact again her brother, a University teacher in the US, to try to understand what is happened in their past. What is the secret? She is determined to bring clarity and serenity in her life. She finally manages to free herself from her “beast inside the heart”.Read More »

Experimental film director Franco Piavoli’s Al Primo Soffio Di Vento (At the First Breath of Wind) is nearly a wordless, non-narrative account of a summer’s day as appreciated by the residents of an estate in Lombardy, Italy.

The family, despite living in a idyllic mansion, live their lives very much apart from one another. The father (Primo Gaburri) is usually holed up in his study, while his wife aimlessly paces the grounds pining away after a former lover. Of the two daughters, the eldest plays sad tunes on the piano, while the younger explores the woods and struggles to understand her recent inklings of sexual attraction.Read More »

Corrado, a policeman for the European task force in charge of immigration control, is on a field assignment in Libya. During a night patrol in the desert, he meets Swada, a young Somaliwoman who left her war-ravaged country.Read More »

A man faces a trial for murder. The court is biased because of his personal qualities.Read More »

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This ground-breaking film won a Special Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and established its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, as a major international talent. The plot concerns a yachting trip by a small group of jaded socialites, including Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), an aging architect who sold out for easy money long ago, his mistress Anna (Lea Massari), and her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti), who doesn’t fit in with the wealthy jet-setters’ dissolute ethics. When Anna disappears during a tour of a volcanic island, Claudia initially blames Sandro’s emotionally barren behavior toward her. As they search the island, however, Claudia and Sandro grow closer and — when it is apparent that Anna is gone forever — become lovers. Unfortunately, Sandro cannot find anything decent inside himself and betrays Claudia with a local prostitute. Caught in the act, Sandro has a heartrending breakdown on a desolate beach, but Claudia silently forgives him. L’avventura caught many audiences who were expecting a mystery by surprise; as in La notte (1961), The Eclipse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), Antonioni is interested less in developing a logical story than in exploring states of feeling and breakdowns in human connection.Read More »

Gianni and Maretta live for three years a relationship that sees them happily in love. The decision to get married radically changes their lives, impacting negatively on their relationship. Cohabitation and daily routine stifle their passion and restrict the cultivation of their respective interests, fatally distant and irreconcilable.

After clumsy attempts at betrayal, they both realize that mutual love is not gone, but it’s just suffocated by forced cohabitation, and so they save their relationship by resuming the menage as an engaged couple, made of amorous encounters that enrich their lives, but lived far apart, each one at his house.Read More »

PLOT: A movie director struggles with his relationship with his family, and with his latest movie, about the impact on the Italian Communist Party of the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956.Read More »