Cinema Italian Style Virtual Screenings

ABOUT THE FILMS

$25 all-access pass / $12.00 per film

BLUE EYES, 2021, Rai Com, 86 min. Dir. Michela Cescon.

Rome. A solo bank and jewelry store robber always manages to escape the cops on a new maxi scooter. The crimes are the talk of the town, and the police commissioner on the case doesn’t know which way to turn. He asks for help from a Parisian friend known as The French, famed for having solved apparently impossible cases, who understands that the culprit behind these robberies is an unassuming blue-eyed woman no one would suspect: a math genius named Valeria, who knows Roman traffic like the back of her hand and aims to prove her worth through theft. Fascinated by her, The French will play a kind of chess game with Valeria, until he’ll be forced into a desperate gamble with the threat of arrest.

AVAILABILITY: United States Viewers

EZIO BOSSO – THE THINGS THAT REMAIN, 2020, True Colors, 104 min. Dir. Giorgio Verdelli.

Ezio Bosso’s unusual career has always been shaped by the love of his art, which for him is both a discipline and a raison d’être. Bosso reveals his real self In this film, taking us into his world and his imagination as if through a diary. With multilayered narration weaving together image and sound, his words alternate with his second voice, music. Friends, family and collaborators like Gabriele Salvatores, Silvio Orlando and Paolo Fresu help to paint an accurate and detailed picture of the man. The previously unreleased THE THINGS THAT REMAIN is a final message from Bosso to the world; as he himself declared: “everyone will tell their own story and I can only hint at mine.”

AVAILABILITY: United States Viewers

FUTURA, 2020, Grasshopper Film, 105 min. Dirs. Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, Alice Rohrwacher.

FUTURA is a truly collective work that explores what boys and girls from 15 to 20 think about the future through a series of interviews filmed during a long journey across Italy. It is a portrait of the country, as seen through the eyes of a group of teens who talk about the places they live in, their dreams, expectations, desires and fears.

AVAILABILITY: California Viewers

LIKE A CAT ON A HIGHWAY 2, 2021, Vision Distribution, 110 min. Dir. Riccardo Milani.

The second chapter of the blockbuster comedy LIKE A CAT ON A HIGHWAY sees the return of Paola Cortellesi and Antonio Albanese as foul-mouthed, tattooed Monica and radical chic intellectual Giovanni, three years after the end of their relationship. When Monica ends up in jail because her twin stepsisters (Alessandra and Valentina Giudicessa) hid stolen goods in the oil drums of “Pizza e Samosa,” she calls her ex for help. Giovanni succeeds in replacing the detention with community service in the parish of San Basilio led by Don Davide (Luca Argentero), who is as handsome as he is pious. So Monica and Giovanni’s lives are intertwined again, but when they organize a lunch in Coccia di Morto with the whole family, the unthinkable happens… An unmissable comic delight that reunites two of Italy’s best-known and loved comedic actors.

AVAILABILITY: United States Viewers

LOVELY BOY, 2021, True Colors, 105 min. Dir. Francesco Lettieri.

Nic – better known as Lovely Boy – is the rising star of Rome’s trap scene, boasting pure talent, numerous face tattoos and utter disinterest for the rest of the world. While his beginnings point him towards a dazzling musical ascent, he risks falling into a dangerous spiral of self-destruction.

AVAILABILITY: United States Viewers

THE HOLE, 2021, Grasshopper Film, 93 min. Dir. Michelangelo Frammartino.

During the economic boom of the 1960s, Europe’s highest building rises in prosperous northern Italy. At the other end of the country, young speleologists explore Europe’s deepest cave in the untouched Calabrian hinterland, reaching the bottom of the Bifurto Abyss 700 meters below for the first time. The intruders’ venture goes unnoticed by the inhabitants of a small neighboring village – but not by the old shepherd of the Pollino plateau, whose solitary life begins to interweave with the group’s journey. Another work of near-wordless beauty that touches on the mystical from visionary director Michelangelo Frammartino (LE QUATTRO VOLTE), this film plumbs unknown depths of life and nature through two parallel voyages to the interior.

AVAILABILITY: California Viewers

THE IMAGE MACHINE OF ALFREDO C., 2021, Cinecittà, 76 min. Dir. Roland Sejko.

As Fascist Italy occupies Albania in April 1939, thousands of Italian workers, settlers and technicians are transferred to the country. When Albania is liberated in November 1944, the new Communist government closes the borders and places dozens of conditions on Italy for the repatriation of its citizens. A year later, 27,000 Italian veterans and civilians are still held in Albania. Among them is a cameraman, Alfredo C. As part of the Fascist propaganda effort, he had been traveling around Albania shooting film for five years. For almost two decades before that, he had immortalized the great machine of the Italian regime. Now, being the only cameraman around, Alfredo has been asked to work on behalf of Communist propaganda. Shut in his storeroom, surrounded by thousands of reels of film, Alfredo watches what he has shot again on an old Moviola. It is his film that we are watching. And perhaps, not his alone.

AVAILABILITY: United States Viewers

THE INNER CAGE, 2021, Vision Distribution, 117 min. Dir. Leonardo Di Costanzo.

An old prison built in the 19th century, located in a remote and unspecified part of Italian territory, is being decommissioned. As a result of bureaucratic holdups the transfers have been blocked and a dozen inmates are left, along with a few guards, waiting to be sent to new destinations. In a suspended atmosphere, the rules that keep them separate are slackened and new forms of relationship emerge among the remaining men.

AVAILABILITY: United States Viewers

THE MACALUSO SISTERS, 2020, Glass Half Full Media, 94 min. Dir. Emma Dante.

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 an ordinary day at the beach, tragedy strikes, upending their relationships for the rest of their lives. “Dante sets a firm seal upon her cross-disciplinary emergence as a director of unusually vivid empathy.” – Variety

AVAILABILITY: California, Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico & Utah Viewers