OPEN ROADS NEW ITALIAN CINEMA SERIES
OPEN ROADS NEW ITALIAN CINEMA FREE

I Can Quit Whenever I Want (Smetto quando voglio)Ī band of brilliant unemployed and underemployed academics-two Latinists, a chemist, a neurobiologist, an anthropologist, and an economist-turn to a life of crime in order to survive. In his fiction debut, Olivierio’s extensive documentary experience is palpable in his portrait of Milan-a character in itself-as well as in the vivid and telling details with which he characterize its inhabitants. Rendered darkly beautiful as a noir setting, Milan is the electric backdrop for this detective story that delves as much into the intimate life of one man and his daughter as into this elegant city’s underworlds. He is a widower with a teenage daughter, and, one night, all his neglected personal issues seem to catch up with him, forcing him out of the slump he’s been in since the death of his wife. Matters get very complicated for chief inspector Monaco (Silvio Orlando) after the murder of a high-profile member of Milan’s seedy nightlife. The resulting film is a deeply personal account of the advent of gay culture amid the ruins of Mussolini’s Italy and the eternally poignant story of how persecuted individuals developed pragmatic ways to attain everyday happiness.

Amelio combines interviews with a wide range of older gay Italian men (including Pasolini muse Ninetto Davoli), newsreel footage, and clips from “educational” films warning against homosexuality, and in the process reveals a profound gap between the subjects’ firsthand experiences and the Italian media’s representations of them. Happy to Be Different (Felice chi è diverso)Ī moving and enlightening work of oral history, Gianni Amelio’s new documentary is a chronicle of gay life in Italy from the fall of Fascism through the early 1980s. Wednesday, June 11, 1:00pm (Q&A with Giovanni Veronesi) Rich in emotions, its ups and downs coinciding with those of the country, Ernesto’s life serves as the perfect platform for abundant laughter and tears.įriday, June 6, 6:30pm (Q&A with Giovanni Veronesi) But his protagonist’s apparent simplicity is precisely one of the strengths of this Tuscan director’s fifteenth feature, which opened the Rome Film Festival last year to great acclaim. His father disparaged Ernesto by likening him to the “fifth wheel of the wagon,” and his aspirations and involvement through the rise and fall of Socialism and the Berlusconi era are accordingly modest.

Played with charm and a disarming sense of humor by Elio Germano, Ernesto is a good-hearted, honest middle-class guy who struggles to keep up with changes and is always a step behind. Veronesi’s irresistible romantic comedy takes a journey through pivotal events in four decades of recent Italian history, as seen through the lens of Ernesto Fioretti’s unexceptional life. Giovanni Veronesi, Italy, 2013, DCP, 113m The Fifth Wheel (L’ultima ruota del carro) However specific the tales, characters, and places, the immersion into these entangled lives is also a tough-minded yet affectionate look at an Italy mired in crisis. Sometimes funny and always poignant, these profoundly human stories flow in and out of one another following a natural rhythm.

An effortless arbiter of the passionate conflicts that arise among tenants, the Quixotic Montella leads us in and out of the homes of his larger-than-life clients, rich and poor Neapolitans whose lives illuminate the city’s volatile moods.

OPEN ROADS NEW ITALIAN CINEMA SERIES

In the lively and absorbing fifth installment in a series of docs celebrating his native Naples, Marra turns a spotlight on the life of Umberto Montella, a building administrator whose job seems to demand skills in management as much as in therapy. Thursday, June 5, 6:30pm (Q&A with Daniele Luchetti) Thursday, June 5, 1:00pm (Q&A with Daniele Luchetti) He also poignantly conveys his own coming-of-age perspective, that of a boy grappling with radical transformations inside his family and on the street, capturing it all with his brand-new Super-8 camera. Luchetti ( My Brother Is an Only Child) brilliantly re-creates the atmosphere of urgency and rapid change surrounding the family.

OPEN ROADS NEW ITALIAN CINEMA FREE

He’s an avant-garde artist and she’s wrestling with gender roles as she discovers feminism and free love. Luchetti’s warm-hearted, bittersweet autobiographical account of his childhood as a budding filmmaker growing up in Rome in the ’70s stars Kim Rossi Stuart and Micaela Ramazotti as unconventional parents caught up in turbulent times.

Open roads new italian cinema