Franco Battiato: The Long Journey

Parthenope, born in the sea near Naples in 1950, is beautiful, enigmatic, and intelligent. She is shamelessly courted by many. However, beauty comes at a cost.

Alice and Tommaso have been together for fifteen years; they don’t have children, he‘s a musician, she’s an actress. Invited to dinner for an announcement, their friends think it’s going to be a marriage announcement, but instead discover that decided to break up: but without drama or emotional rifts, staying friends with each other. A legitimate but naive ambition. Love stories end, because people change. And no change is, nor can it be, painless.

In 1920s Bagheria, Giuseppe 'Peppino' Torrenuova works as a shepherd to financially help his poor family. Over the next fifty years, Giuseppe's life, as well as the life of the village, is observed. Giuseppe grows up, joins the Communist Party, marries a local girl, has children, and forges a political career for himself.

The troubled relationship between Gianni and Nino, set in the narrow-minded and prejudicial Sicily of 1982.

Milan, Italy, 1967. Santo Russo, a boy of Calabrian origin, arrives north with his parents and younger brother to find better living conditions. Due to an absurd misunderstanding and his father's contempt, Santo ends up in prison, where he gets a “true education.” In 1978, he and his friends Slim and Mario embark on a 15-year criminal career, a successful and ruthless spiral of robberies, kidnappings, murders and heroin smuggling.

Three prostitutes live in the wasteland by the sea, where a village of outcasts has emerged. It is life in a harsh reality of poverty, ignorance, and violence. And the only ray of light in their lives is Arturo, whom they care for together. The young man is a weak-minded child in an adult body. His mother died in childbirth, and the women took him into their care as a newborn. What will the fate of this young man be in an environment he has not chosen and cannot choose because of his disability?

It’s 1965 and Lia, a spirited young woman living in a small Sicilian town, is initially attracted to Lorenzo, the son of the most prominent (and possibly Mafia-tied) local family. His possessiveness eventually repels her. But soon after, he appears with his cronies to kidnap, rape and force her into a shotgun marriage, all with the collusion of the town’s authorities. Lia and her family refuse to accept this barbaric ‘tradition’ and, despite the constant intimidation and violence, they take their fight for Lia’s rights to court.

The year is 1764. For over a year, Josef has been leading a precarious life in Venice. He hopes to become an opera composer. The city, full of talented and already-established composers, seems closed to him. Looking for work as a violinist, he comes into the orbit of a rich young woman. Thanks to her, he gets the opportunity to play at salons. But his real opportunity arises when he becomes the lover of a libertine marquise. She teaches him worldly manners, rids him of signs of a provincial upbringing and introduces him to a hedonistic existence free from religious intolerance. Thus transformed, Josef gets an incan incredible commission: to write an opera for the San Carlo, Europe's largest theatre.

Nadine is a French young woman. Fausto is an Italian young man trying to make it in Paris as a restaurant waiter. They accidentally meet at a five-star hotel. Both are fragile, alone and obsessed with the idea of an unattainable happiness. Their intense love is challenged by their own individual ambition and desperation.

Antonio, who fled Naples many years ago, has built a family and a successful career in Milan, far from his mother Angela — a woman excessive in both her virtues and her flaws, irresistible, old-fashioned and hostile like few others — who has come to visit for Christmas and seems determined to stay. Christmas Eve dinner becomes an emotional battlefield, at once comic and fierce, bringing to the surface a past of impositions and misunderstandings. With a stubborn capon that refuses to end up in the pot, a daughter whose arrival remains uncertain, and an unexpected distinguished guest, the evening turns into a reckoning between mother and son destined to change the meaning of their bond forever: a love that burns like a fire within, one that never dies out — not even by leaving.

Maria, Pinuccia, Lia, Katia and Antonella are five sisters who live in an apartment in Palermo. They make a living by renting doves for ceremonies. On a normal day at the beach, tragedy strucks.

Rosa is a young rebel girl who lives with her grandmother and her uncle in a remote part of Calabria, in Southernmost Italy. Her mother's untimely death when Rosa was a child casts a gloomy shadow on her present life.

A young man's odyssey to erase his pain and nightmares leads him to question his schizophrenia diagnosis. He seeks answers in Sicily, where spirits and curses still evoke fear among locals.

Secretary of the most influential Communist Party in the Western world, Enrico Berlinguer challenged the international balance by seeking to bring the Communists to government in Italy and achieve socialism in a democratic country. From 1973, when he escaped an attack by the Bulgarian secret services, to the assassination of his main ally Aldo Moro in 1978, not forgetting his trips to Moscow and the covers of Time: the story of a man who wanted to change the world, but failed.

The life and times of Pippo Fava, a Sicilian journalist who fought the Mafia through his local newspaper in the '70s and early '80s, meeting an untimely end.

United by an uncompromising struggle as members of the infamous 1970s far-left terrorist group Prima Linea, fugitive couple Sergio and Susanna have become increasingly alienated from the real world. Their luck runs out when Susanna is captured and thrown in jail. Putting his life on the line, Sergio embarks on a radical plan... Loosely based on the memoir by Prima Linea's 'commander' Sergio Segio.

Anton is a young Romanian worker who works illegally. Due to an heartbreak and his condition as an irregular foreigner, he decides to make an extreme gesture

Inside a warehouse in Palermo, a group of people smashes a man’s arm to pieces with a wheelie bag packed with weights. This is the method used by an amateur criminal organization that fractures the limbs of its willing victims before staging fake accidents and raking in the insurance payouts. Vincenzo recruits the individuals from among the down-and-outs that haunt the city streets, where Luisa is a habitué, since she gets her crack there. Vincenzo’s problems suddenly get worse, though, after a series of mistakes shut him out of the gang, and Luisa is now his only chance: he convinces her to have her bones broken.

After losing her job and her apartment, Marta Sironi, an aspiring stand-up comedian, reinvents herself as “Frau Klara,” a strict and highly qualified German nanny, and is hired to take care of two difficult kids. Marta must now choose whether to keep hiding or finally embrace who she really is, fighting for her dream, and protecting the people she has come to love.

For the sommeliers, coffee has three flavors: bitter, sour and a bit of fragrant towards the end. Through the common element of this so evocative product, this movie tells three stories set in three very different parts of the world. In Belgium, during some riots, a precious coffeepot gets stolen from Hamed's shop. He'll decide, once discovers the identity of the thief, to take vengeance alone. In Italy, Renzo, a young Latte Art expert, is involved in a robbery in a coffee shop, but things don't go as planned. In China, Ren Fei, a brilliant manager, finds out that his factory risks destroying a valley in the Yunnan, the beautiful region on the border with Laos.

Pauline, a beguiling woman in her 60s, returns to her hometown, Turin, for the first time since she was ten years old. She has inherited her aunt’s apartment in town. In Turin Pauline contacts Dr. Angela Gualtieri, a psychologist whom she had met abroad some time before; Angela runs a maternity centre, the Melograno, a support centre where both mothers to be and young mothers with post natal depression seek help. At the Melograno they are constantly short of help, that’s why Angela asks Pauline to give her a hand in setting up an in-house archive collecting different material relating to maternity: video interviews to new mothers, mothers diaries, photo portraits of mother and child. Pauline accepts and starts her work plunging deep in an emotional material that touches her strongly: the controversial feelings experienced by women in their relation with the child.

James wakes up in the middle of night after a nightmare regarding war and deaths.

A small Sicilian town elects a new, honest major but quickly learns that playing by the rules is not as easy as it seems.

In Polignano a Mare, covered in snow, they are more nervous than usual. Hysterics, anxiousness, pregnancy tests, lost rings and stuck lifts - what else can happen?

Little Things of No Importance

Three girls that live in the same apartment struggle with boys' relationships. They swear to not deal with boys for some time but a mysterious boy goes to live next to their house. Curiosity will make its way.

The story is about Eva, a Ukrainian girl who has come to Milan to work as a model. As soon as she arrives in Italy she attracts the attention of the male world. All of the men that she encounters seem to be solely interested in exploiting her beauty: and so we have Luke, the stalker, who never stops tormenting her with text messages and phone calls; Airoldi, the shady television producer, who offers her various jobs in exchange for her sexual favours, and lastly, Tom, a vile photographer, who has no scruples whatsoever. After being raped at a party by Tom and two of his colleagues, Eva is invited by Cindy, her flatmate, to a sort of Sabbath, attended solely by women, in a place outside Milan. From that moment on, the gateway to success in the fashion world opens before Eva and, at the same time, a tremendous vendetta begins against the violent male world.

He is a plain estate agent who lives his uneventful life in the anonymous suburb of an unspecified city. Indeed such a showing of "compulsive ordinariness" conceals his predicament of autistic isolation. Therefore, as he attempts to make up the illusion of an ideal world, he daily puts on a pantomime of the "perfect neighborhood", which is painstakingly staged by a group of paid walk on people. While such an artifice seems to help him fulfill his unexpressed love dream, a harsh overwhelming reality forces him to give up his illusions and eventually get in touch with the imperfect human dimension. The Plastic Cardboard Sonata is a story of urban loneliness, featuring lyric suggestions in the context of a paradoxical frame. By means of an accurate use of silence it sketches out the essence of daily life malaise.