Amleto di Carmelo Bene (da Shakespeare a Laforgue)

In Nazi Germany, Kitty runs a brothel where the soldiers come to 'relax'. Recording devices have been installed by a power-hungry official who plans to use the information to blackmail and usurp Hitler. One of the girls discovers the ploy and, with the madam's help, takes on the dangerous task of exposing the conspiracy.

In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.

In pre-war Italy, a young couple have a baby boy. The father, however, is jealous of his son - and the scene moves to antiquity, where the baby is taken into the desert to be killed. He is rescued, given the name Oedipus, and brought up by the King and Queen of Corinth as their son. One day an oracle informs Oedipus that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he flees Corinth and his supposed parents - only to get into a fight and kill an older man on the road…

A feisty 18-year-old Italian-American New Yorker named Cindy is sent off to Rome with her irascible stepmother and vain stepsisters. On the way, she meets and falls in love with, globetrotting bagpacker Mizio, who eventually turns out to be of Italian nobility. There's a fairy stand-in in the form of a spaced-out astrologer, a dance, and she even loses a shoe at one point. Care to venture a guess how it all turns out?

Fellini exposes his great attraction for the clowns and the world of the circus first recalling a childhood experience when the circus arrives nearby his home. Then he joins his crew and travel from Italy to Paris chasing the last greatest European clowns still live in these countries. He also meets Anita Ekberg trying to buy a panther in a circus.

Over two decades after their affair ended, a married man is haunted by the presence of his former lover.

Aboard a ship early in the 20th-century, a middle-aged Italian tells his story of love to a Russian.

This slight skewering of the mindset of the Fascist era when Italy’s “White Telephone” films (conservative minded sophisticated comedy-dramas revolving around the bourgeoisie) were in vogue gives Agostina Belli her best role – an ambitious Venetian girl that goes from chambermaid to prostitute to singer to film-star to mistress of ‘Il Duce’! – for which she received a special David Di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar.

Upon his release from prison, an ex-convict returns to his beloved city of Genoa, and to his lover.

A dramatization of the events from the Last Supper through the arrest and trial of Jesus to the Crucifixion.

To the protagonist, an intellectual so feverish that he seems pathologically unrecoverable, a confused memory resurfaces of a massacre carried out by the Turks in Otranto. Immersing himself in one of the victims, in the unconscious desire to eviscerate himself, a woman appears to him, Margherita, who, in the guise of Santa Maria d'Otranto, treats him with compassionate love. In the hallucinating succession of memories intertwined with historical events, the protagonist finds himself in contact with his environment, his land, his country.

Salome is the daughter of the second wife of King Herod. The King is infatuated with her and, after she fails to seduce the prophet John The Baptist, she dances for the King in order to ask for his execution.

The Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, is little interested in family affairs and the fate of the kingdom, and not at all attracted by a doll-like Ophelia sucking his finger. Annoyed by his friend Horatio, who tells him of the apparition of his father's spectre that would like to drive him to revenge, and by Polonius, Ophelia's father, who psychoanalyses him by explaining the Oedipus complex, he imagines escaping to Paris with Kate, the leading actress of the company performing in Elsinore, to become a playwright.

Frank was removed from an investigation into Mac Brown, the owner of a pharmaceutical company, who was suspected of drug trafficking and illegal experiments on teenagers. When Brown is murdered, Frank is called to investigate...

A collection of dark-humoured vignettes, including tales of a cardinal with a liberal congregation, a motorist and a hitchhiker, mentally challenged tramps, parents contemplating their daughter's participation in a pornographic film, and a conniving husband.

Father Maurice, a priest living in a residential college for priests in Rome, is called out one day to "exorcise" the devil from someone. The devil turns out to be in the form of a fun-loving man called Giuditta. What Father Maurice doesn't know is that this type of devil will turn his life around.

Margherita, a regular girl just about to turn thirty, has got a life and a normal job, a boyfriend whom she loves and a she did not get any strange ideas. Her existence is disrupted by the death of her beloved grandmother who had raised her. The old woman was hiding a secret that had torn her soul for years: discovering what happened to her mother, a young actress in twenties, disappeared during the shooting of a film directed by a madman named Agenore Venturi. After the grandmother's funeral, Margherita begins to have terrifying visions and fears to going crazy. Even her boyfriend begins to doubt her sanity. The visions are increasingly disturbing and Margherita decides to seek help from a priest, her confidant. The man reveals to her something terrible about Venturi's past. After overcoming many misfortunes, Margherita succeeded in finding copy of the film that was supposed to be lost. The vision of those images reveals a truth that had to remain buried in the oblivion of time.

On his way back from the Civil War, Johnny Hamilton is visited in his sleep by the ghost of his father who lets him know that he has been murdered and who asks him to avenge him. Back in the family ranch, Johnny finds that not only has his father been killed but that Gertrude, his mother, has married her late husband's brother Claude. The latter is now the owner of the ranch and of all the properties of the deceased. Polonius, a ruthless bandit, is supposed to have killed Johnny's father. But couldn't it be Claude...?

In 1966, Bene presented The Pink and the Black, his successful theatrical adaptation of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ lurid Gothic novel from 1796. Experimental filmmaker Paolo Brunatto filmed some of the play’s rehearsals in a Rome apartment (also frequented also by the Living Theatre). Bene's artistry is encapsulated in one sentence: “One cannot continue to prostitute the idea of theatre, which stands only for a magical, brutal link with reality."

A homicide detective realizes that the brutal murders committed by a mysterious serial killer he's after have something to do with the late husband of a beautiful widow.

Luke Barrett, having lost his memory due to an accident, does not realize that Dingus had killed his wife and brother to take possession of the Barretts' land and money. At first Luke trusts him, but while looking for his forgotten identity he discovers the truth.

Having casually overheard a confusing phone conversation between two women, Alberto manages to get in touch with one of the callers, Claudia, a painter. The two become lovers and things are spiced up by Claudia's ambiguous sexual nature and by the presence of her former lover, Pietro. Alberto discovers a pistol in Claudia's handbag and this leads to a further revelation: she's dominated by her stepmother Greta, who forced her into a clandestine lesbian relationship; of which Claudia is ashamed and wants to end - at all costs. Alberto, now a slave to love, runs Greta over. But Claudia denies urging him to murder...

Bob is a successful actor, but his career gets doomed by a strange phenomenon: the animal kingdom is taking on him!

Produced by RAI and filmed in the Turin studios in 1979 but edited years later, in 2001-2002, this is the staging for TV of Carmelo Bene's play of the same name. One of his last works, it premiered in 2002, on March 18, immediately after his death, at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.

A mysterious object of Italian cinema, starring cult figures from the Roman scene of the 1970s and 1980s, an ambitious attempt to portray the Roman dolce vita on the spot, or what remains of it after the post-1968 recession. Characters adrift dance in the dark, bringing their explosive vitality to the stage, but the end of it all is near and will overwhelm them.