There’s only one way to find out, though at first glance, the several sections of the Venice Film Festival list a good number of different points of view on modern Italian cinema – all names we know and love, and promising debutants. While some directors chose to tell stories from faraway lands, others stayed in Italy, with the goal of showing it to the world.
In the main competition, three great filmmakers who have a lot to say on the current state of affairs. In Il signore delle formiche, Gianni Amelio recollects the Braibanti case, a 1968 trial against a philosophy professor, accused of manipulating a young man. Susanna Nicchiarelli’s biopic Chiara is about the life of Saint Claire. With L’immensità, Emanuele Crialese takes us back to the Rome of the 1960s, the background of a family story starring Penélope Cruz. Out of competition, Paolo Virzì looks at a possibly tormented future: his Siccità shows what happens to the city of Rome after a three-year drought. And there’s much more in the Orizzonti section. Enjoy!
Assisi, central Italy, year 1211. Chiara (Margherita Mazzucco, My Brilliant Friend) is barely eighteen when one night, she leaves her family home and all her comforts to meet his friend, Francis (Andrea Carpenzano). For Chiara, the founder of the Poor Clares orders, t...
Inspired by real-life events – the story and legal troubles of poet and dramatist Aldo Braibanti – that took place in Italy in the late 1960s, the film depicts Braibanti’s trial. He had been accused of psychologically forcing into submission a student and friend of his, ...
The backdrop is Rome in the 1970s and a bourgeois environment. In a new, modern apartment, Clara e Felice cannot seem to come to terms with the end of their marriage. The only thing keeping them together are their children. Adriana, twelve years old, witnesses her mother’s d...
Princess is a young Nigerian woman and an undocumented immigrant to Italy. She works the streets. Like a legendary Amazon, she travels to a sort of enchanted forest, a large pinewood extending as far as the sea and a place of solace, as well as sustenance. It is there that she...
The so-called fourth mafia, established in the Gargano region in southern Italy, is little known, but very dangerous. Two families, the Malatestas and the Camporeales, have been fighting a turf war for a long time. Their feud fires up when Andrea Malatesta and Marilen...
A future without water: how far removed is a possibility such as this, following climate change and social predicaments of the last few years? The film speculates on an apocalyptic, almost irreversible scenario, though not as improbable as it may seem. Like a biblical plague, ...
