Italian Cinema Today

Italian actors Antonio Catania and Kasia Smutniak take to the big screen at the Sundance Film Festival this week in Jacek Borcuch’s Dolce Fine Giornata . The film follows Maria Linde, a free-spirited, Jewish Polish Nobel Prize winner, who lives in Tuscany surrounded by warmth and chaos in her family’s villa. A loving mother and grandmother, she also fosters a secret flirtation with the much younger Egyptian man who runs a nearby seaside inn. After a terrorist attack in Rome, Maria refuses to succumb to the hysterical fear and anti-immigrant sentiment that quickly emerge, deciding in her acceptance speech of a local honor to boldly decry Europe’s eroding democracy—but she is unprepared for the public and personal havoc her comments wreak. Jacek Borcuch returns to the Sundance Film Festival’s world dramatic competition for the third time (after 2010’s All That I Love and 2013’s Lasting) with a visually sumptuous film. It thoughtfully considers the role of art, pol...

A scene from Dafne Here are the Italian films in the lineup of the 2019 Berlin Film Festival... ANBESSA by Mo Scarpelli Section: Generation KpPlus DAFNE by Federico Bondi Section: Panorama FLESH OUT by Michela Occhipinti Section: Panorama HANNAH by Andrea Pallaoro: Homage to Charlotte Rampling NORMAL by Adele Tulli Section: Panorama PIRANHAS by Claudio Giovannesi: Competition SELFIE by Agostino Ferrente: Section: Panorama Agostino Ferrente's Selfie is the story of two Neapolitan teenagers who film themselves with an iPhone to tell about their difficult neighbourhood, their daily life, the friendship that bonds them together. Federico Bondi's Dafne is the story  of a woman with Down syndrome who is coming to terms with the death of her mother while caring for her father. Adapted from Roberto Saviano's best-selling novel, La Paranoia del Bambini was directed by Claudio Giovanese and speaks of the world of teenage crime bosses in Naples as they ...

Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name will be the only Italian film in this year's Berlin Film Festival, and will be screened out of competition.  According to the film's distributor, Sony Pictures Classics,  Call Me By Your Name  is based on André Aciman’s acclaimed novel of the same name. Directed by Guadagnino and co-written by James Ivory, Walter Fasano and Guadagnino, it will have its world premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival in the Premieres section.  Starring Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg,  Call Me By Your Name  explores the  vital and cultivated Elio (Chalamet), the only child of the American-Italian-French Perlman family, who is facing another lazy summer at his parents’ villa in the beautiful Italian countryside when Oliver (Hammer), an academic who has come to help with Elio’s father’s research, arrives. Sony Pictures Classics describes the film as "Visually rich, stunning, deeply emotional and...