The Violin Maker of Cremona

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

2002 · ★ 6.8

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor's beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

Golden Door

2006 · ★ 6.5

The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.

Ask the Dust

2006 · ★ 5.5

Mexican beauty Camilla hopes to rise above her station by marrying a wealthy American. That is complicated by meeting Arturo Bandini, a first-generation Italian hoping to land a writing career and a blue-eyed blonde on his arm.

Cry to Heaven

Set in 18th-century Venice, the paths of two unlikely collaborators: a Venetian noble and a castrated singer from Calabria, both tries to succeed in the world of the opera.

Bologna Brigante

2024 · ★ 6

No synopsis available.

Contempt

1963 · ★ 7

Art film producer Jeremy Prokosch, unhappy with the work of his director, hires Fritz Lang (as himself) to direct an adaptation of The Odyssey, but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb, he brings in a screenwriter to energise the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.

Amadeus

1984 · ★ 8

Disciplined Italian composer Antonio Salieri becomes consumed by jealousy and resentment towards the hedonistic and remarkably talented young Salzburger composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Life Is Beautiful

1997 · ★ 8.4

A touching story of an Italian book seller of Jewish ancestry who lives in his own little fairy tale. His creative and happy life would come to an abrupt halt when his entire family is deported to a concentration camp during World War II. While locked up he tries to convince his son that the whole thing is just a game.

42plus

2007 · ★ 5

When the beautiful, efficient and successful Christine, 42, arrives at their summer beach home with her husband and teenage daughter, a young hitchhiker catches her eye. What follows is the story of a woman who frees herself, tears her life into pieces and puts it back together in a different order.

The Adventures of Pinocchio

1996 · ★ 5.3

One of puppet-maker Geppetto's creations comes magically to life. This puppet, Pinocchio, has one major desire and that is to become a real boy someday. In order to accomplish this goal he has to learn to act responsibly. This film shows you the adventures on which he learns valuable lessons.

Phyllis

2011

Phyllis is a moving and atmospheric portrait of a ‘psychic’ vampire, a woman obsessed with synthetic Nollywood dramas, that lives alone in Lagos, Nigeria. The central idea of this short experimental film is the practise and significance of wig-wearing in Nollywood film; a practise the director has invested with deeper psychological as well as science-fiction layers. Underpinning this central idea however is a critique of the unforgiving treatment of single women in Nollywood and Nigeria. The film is an example of what the director, Zina Saro-Wiwa, has termed “alt-Nollywood”, a genre that plays with and reworks certain narrative, stylistic and visual conventions of Nollywood. Phyllis explores the gothic possibilities of the Nollywood aesthetic creating a new kind of low-budget atmospheric film that is very much of Nollywood and yet subverts the genre. Using Nollywood to subvert Nollywood.

Caravaggio

1986 · ★ 6.1

A retelling of the life of the celebrated 17th-century Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio through his brilliant, nearly blasphemous paintings and his flirtations with the underworld.