Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
The film consists of three short stories about couples in different parts of Italy. Starring in all three episodes Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. The film won the Academy for Best Foreign Language Film at the 37th Academy Awards.
Director: Vittorio De Sica – Italy 1963 – 118 min.
Marriage Italian Style
Domenico Soriano, a successfull businessman, with an eye for the girls, begins an affair with Filumena when she is 17 years old. She becomes a prostitute, but also becomes the mistress of Domenico. He eventually sets her up in his apartment, and she works for him in his various businesses. She secretly bears three children, who are raised by nannys.
Director: Vittorio De Sica – Italy 1964 – 101 min.
Sunflower
Excruciating love story in which Giovanna (Sofia Loren), a bereft Italian spouse wandering and looking after cemetery after war cemetery in Russia, looking for her husband Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), who never returned after serving on the Russian front in World War II. Finally finds him with a Russian wife, and a daughter, and amnesia.
Director: Vittorio De Sica – Italy, USSR, France 1970 – 107 min.
Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator at Piazza Vittorio
A small culturally mixed community living in an apartment building in the center of Rome is thrown into disarray when one of the neighbors is murdered. An investigation ensues and as each of the victims neighbors is questioned, the reader is offered an all-access pass into the most colorful neighborhood in contemporary Rome.
Director: Isotta Toso – Italy 2010 – 96 min.
The Passion
In a small village in Umbria, film director Gianni Dubois is in deep creative crisis. His home water pipe in Tuscany broke, damaging an ancient fresco of the neighboring church. To avoid paying the damage, he must finance and direct a sacred representation of the Passion of Christ.
Director: Carlo Mazzacurati – Italy 2010 – 106 min.
Mi Faccio Vivo
This film tells the hilarious story of the entrepreneur Biagio Bianchetti – owner of BB stores and hiseternal rivalry, which began at school, with the lucky, goodlooking and charming Ottone Di Valerio. After a series of unfortunate events, dogged by bad luck and now on the brink of ruin, Biagio makes a last and ultimate gesture.
Director: Sergio Rubini – Italy 2013 – 105 min.
The Interval
A young man and a woman are confined in a huge abandoned building in a working-class neighborhood. One must watch over the other. She is a captive and he is forced by the local mobster to be her jailer.
Despite their youth, both act older than their age: Veronica as a mature and uninhibited woman, and Salvatore as a young man who must follow orders to preserve his own well- being.
Director: Leonardo Di Costanzo – Italy 2012 – 90 min.
South is Nothing
Shot in Calabria next to the Strait of Messina, this low-key, understated, and highly effective film is a fine evocation of loss and confusion in a besieged Italian family. South is Nothing is centred on the integral and honest performance by Miriam Karlkvist, who absolutely nails the central role of a seventeen-year-old devastated by the loss of her beloved brother, Pietro.
Director: Fabio Mollo – Italy, France 2013 – 90 min.
Perfect Day
Emma and Antonio, married with two children, have been separated for nearly a year. Antonio is living alone in the house where they used to live together, while Emma moved back with her mother, taking their children with her. One night, a flying squad is called to the palazzo and the police burst into the apartment where gunshots have been heard. In a rapid succession of events, the film describes the twenty-four hours before this moment, the simple but “unique” life of a group of people who are shadowed every step they take.
Director: Ferzan Õzpetek – Italy 2008 – 105 min.
Balancing Act
Giulio is forty years old and leads an apparently peaceful life. He lives in a rented apartment, has a steady job, a car purchased in installments, a rebellious but nice daughter, a sweet son who’s a dreamer, a wife he loves and is unfaithful to. She discovers Giulio’s affair, leaves him and his fairy-tale life suddenly crumbles. But what happens to a couple who “dare” separate from each other in this day and age? Through a wide array of events that are at times tragic and at times ironic, the film takes us hand-in-hand into the world of a man who suddenly discovers how thin the line between well-being and despair truly is.
Director: Ivano De Matteo – Italy, France 2012 – 100 min.
Second Childhood
Lino and his wife Chicca lead a happy life and are satisfied with their marriage and their careers. He is a sports editor and she is a professor of medieval languages. Their only regret is not having children but even that seems to have strengthened their relationship. Unexpectedly, Lino’s memory problems aggravate until he is diagnosed with a degenerative illness affecting his brain cells. So begins the slow process of a man drifting from his present and regressing to his childhood. Throughout, Chicca stands by her husband, sharing his regression and nurses him as the child they never had.
Director: Pupi Avati – Italy 2010 – 98 min.
Cosmonaut
Late ’50s to early ’60s, when the space war between the Soviet and US was fiercely going on, a fifteen-year-old member of the communist party, Luciana, develops her ideals while living with her bourgeois stepfather, and among male chauvinists in a communist group in Rome. Her only friend is her brother Arturo, who dreams of going to space but is unable to do so due to his epilepsy.
Director: Susanna Nichiarelli – Italy 2008 – 85 min.
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