Date Time Title
22.11.2008 6.30 p.m PARLAMI D’AMORE & Saturday L’ARIA SALATA
23.11.2008 6.30 p.m MORTE A VENEZIA - Sunday
24.11.2008 6.30 p.m LA SCONOSCIUTA - Monday
25.11.2008 6.15 p.m. UNO SU DUE & Tuesday I DEMONI DI SAN PIETROBURGO
26.11.2008 6.15 p.m PRIVATE & Wednesday NUOVOMONDO
27.11.2008 6.15 p.m LIBERI & Thursday LEZIONI DI VOLO
SYNOPSES
22.11.2008 Saturday 6.15 p.m.
Parlami d’amore - 2008 - 105 Mts - Director: Silvio Muccino
Cast: Silvio Muccino, Aitana Sanchez-Gijon, Carolina Crescentini
A case of serendipity extends itself over many years in Italian director Silvio Muccino’s bittersweet romantic drama Parlami d’amore (Let’s Talk About Love). Aitana Sanchez-Gijon stars as Nicole, a quadragenarian housewife in a supremely dysfunctional marriage, and Silvio Muccino is Sasha, the twenty-year-old son of a drug-addicted mother and father; the pair meet when their cars crash one fateful evening and they accidentally injure a dog in the process. Taking the canine to a veterinary hospital, the two strangers sense a latent attraction to one another and swap phone numbers but (for unspoken reasons) refrain from calling each other for a lengthy period of time. In that interim, Sasha becomes unwisely attracted to a low-class girl with barrel-bottom standards; unacquainted with the young woman, Nicole offers Sasha advice that helps him win the girl’s heart. In time, however, the new girlfriend drags Sasha into heavy gambling and unsavory company, and Sasha and Nicole subsequently begin to realize just how perfect the two of them are for one another.
L’aria Salata - 2007 - 85 Mts - Director : Alessandro Angelini.
Cast : Giorgio Pasotti, Michela Cescon, Giorgio Colangeli, Katy Louise Saunders
Fabio (Giorgio Pasotti) works as a social worker in a Rome prison, skillfully giving counseling and support to the detainees. When he’s assigned the case of a convicted murderer (Giorgio Colangeli), who has already spent 20 years behind the bars, Fabio shockingly realizes the man is his own father, whom he hasn’t seen since the time of the crime. From that moment on, Fabio has to reconsider the relationship with a father who so long ago left the family in shambles. The man wants to win back his son’s affection, but the bitterness he has acquired behind bars makes it a daunting challenge. An emotionally stirring study of abandonment, remorse and longing between father and son.
23.11.2008 Sunday 6.30 p.m
Morte A Venezia - 1971 - 130 Mts - Director: Luchino Visconti
Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, Silvana Mangano, Romolo Valli
Based on a novel by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice stars Dirk Bogarde as a German composer who is terrified that he has lost all vestiges of humanity. While visiting Venice, Bogarde falls in love with a beautiful young boy (Bjorn Andresen). The relationship is ruined by Bogarde’s obsession with the boy’s youth and physical perfection; the composer realizes that the child represents an ideal that he can never match. The character played by Dirk Bogarde is evidently intended to be Gustav Mahler, whose haunting music is featured on the film’s soundtrack.
24.11.2008 Monday 6.30 p.m.
La Sconosciuta - 2006 - 120 Mts - Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Cast: Ksenia Rappoport, Michele Placido, Claudia Gerini, Pierfrancesco Favino
Giuseppe Tornatore’s sleazy Hitchcockian thriller, “The Unknown Woman,” keeps you glued to the screen despite your increasingly nagging doubts about its integrity. Just under two hours, sumptuously photographed in noirish shades and slathered in spine-tingling music by Ennio Morricone, it twists every which way to sustain suspense until the final frame. A story of sexual slavery, retaliation and greed with teasing peephole glimpses of prostitutes being tortured, “The Unknown Woman” licks its lips at every turn.
25.11.2008 Tuesday 6.15 p.m.
Uno Su Due - 2007 - 95 Mts - Director Eugenio Cappuccio’s
Cast : Fabio Volo, Ninetto Davoli, Giuseppe Battiston, Anita Caprioli
The drama is about a brash lawyer (Fabio Volo) who comes face to face with mortality when a sudden blackout forces him to the hospital, with a possible prognosis of a malignant brain tumor. Illness was certainly not in Lorenzo’s plans, and waiting for his results, confronting his mortality, is not easy. The one who understands him is the patient in the bed next to him, Giovanni, (Pasolini veteran Ninetto Davoli) who provides a much-needed dose of patience and humor. Giovanni has his problematic past: a daughter he hasn’t seen in years. And so I gratitude to Giovanni, Lorenzo travels to Umbria to find her and bring her back to Genoa, to see her father.
Demoni Di San Pietroburgo - 2007 - 110 Mts - Director: Giuliano Montaldo
Cast: Miki Manojlovic
The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in the past spent 10 years doing forced labor in Siberia for his subversive intentions, finds himself in 1860s St. Petersburg at the center of a revolutionary plot to kill the imperial family. In a desperate attempt to thwart the plan, he comes into contact with the young terrorists whose ideas of freedom and decisions to take action were inspired precisely by his writings.
26.11.2008 Wednesday 6.15 p.m.
Private - 2004 - 90 Mts - Director : Saverio Costanzo.
Cast : Mohammad Bakri, Lior Miller
A debut film by the director, the film is a minimalist psychological drama about a Palestinian family of seven suddenly confronted with a volatile situation in their home that in many ways reflects the larger ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israel.
Mohammad, his wife and their five children live in a large, isolated house located halfway between a Palestinian village and an Israeli settlement. The house, in the crossfire of the two sides, is a strategic lookout point that the Israeli army decides to seize, confining the family to a few downstairs rooms in daytime and a single room at night. Mohammad refuses to leave this home and, reinforced by his principles against violence, decides to find a way to keep his family together in the house until the Israeli soldiers move on.
Nuovomondo - 2005 - 105 Mts - Director : Emanuele Crialese
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vincenzo Amato, Francesco Casisa, Filippo Pucillo, Vincent Schiavelli
During the turn of the 20th Century, the poor Mancuso family (headed by the widowed Salvatore, Vincenzo Amato), from Sicily, Italy, emigrates to the United States. They dream of the land of opportunity, where giant vegetables are grown, people swim in milk, and coins fall from the sky. Salvatore takes his family, as well as his fiery and proud mother, Fortunata (Aurora Quattrocchi). While on the ship to America, many men find the British Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg) attractive. For administrative reasons, Lucy wants to marry Salvatore on arrival on Ellis Island. He agrees; he understands that she is not in love with him yet, but expects that will come.
At Ellis Island, the families undergo extensive and humiliating physical and psychological examinations and questioning. Pietro (Filippo Pucillo) is about to be sent back for being mute, and Salvatore’s mother may be sent back for insufficient intelligence.
27.11.2008 Thursday 6.15 p.m. - Liberi - 2003 - 100 Mts - Director :Gianluca Maria Tavarelli
Cast: Elio Germano, Nicole Grimaudo, Luigi Maria Burruano
Liberi (Break Free) centers on the freckle-faced Vince (Elio Germano), whose life in a Roman mountain village is unfulfilling, to say the least. His father Cenzo (Luigi Maria Burruano) lost his job after a local chemical plant closed; shortly afterward, Cenzo’s wife Paola (Anita Zagaria) dumped him for a politician. Fed up, Vince travels to the beach town of Pescara and lands a job as a junior cook at a tourist resort. While there, he falls in love with Genny (Nicole Grimaudo), a waitress plagued by a phobia of traveling. Just as the romance begins to take off, Cenzo appears at Vince’s doorstep demanding that his son help him get Paola back
Lezioni Di Volo - 2007 - 100 Mts - Director: Francesca Archibugi
Cast : Flavio Bucci, Roberto Citran, Anna Galiena, Giovanna Mezzogiorno
Pollo and Curry inseparable 18 year-old friends, have both failed their last year of high school. Curry was adopted as a baby from India and guilt trips his family into letting him take a much-dreamed-of trip to his birthplace with his best friend, who comes from a rigid, Jewish family. India, however, is not what they expected. Finding it poor and dirty, they get robbed. Curry is taken for a native (he even gets arrested by the police during a demonstration), while Pollo gets sick and meets a western doctor (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), ten years older than him, whom he falls desperately in love with. She takes them both to the small outpost where she works as a volunteer, and they finally find the reason for their trip: Curry discovers his past, while Pollo finds his future.
