A private affair

Four Sicilian episodes after the 'Novelle per un anno', in which Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello wrote down earthy and extraordinary stories that his governess once told him. The Vienna Film Museum writes: "What remains incessantly perceptible in these tragic, lyrical and grotesque episodes about painful mothers, moon-addicted farmers, rebellious shepherds, fools and shawls is the powerful, sweeping lust for narration, the infatuation with the glare of day and night, the passion for sensuous, pasty pictures and the love for the country and its creatures. In the fifth episode, which talks abou Pirandello himself, the film comes to life. A journey into childhood. A down-fall over the white, wonderful sand cliffs of Lipari to the sea, which is drunken blue and green: a moment of happiness, a lust that does not want to end".

The film that captivated more than 8,000 people on an unforgettable evening in Locarno's Piazza Grande with its cinematic magic and message of peace. In the summer of 1944, a group of residents from their home village of San Miniato in Tuscany secretly sneaked out to meet the American liberators. According to instructions, those who remain behind seek shelter in the church and fall victim to a retaliatory strike by the Germans. The refugees live through all stages of hope and despair along the way in the Tuscan landscape and are confronted with Italian fascists in a legendary sequence. La notte di San Lorenzo is in itself a historical film in the sense that it tells of a bygone era. Through the fairytale-like-mythical and melodramatic exaggerations, the Tavianis make the story stand out from the merely historical and allow the film through the wonderful figure of the girl to acquire universal expressiveness. This is a peace film of elementary sensuality and power.

In the deep Sardinia of the 1940s, at the age of five, little Gavino is forced to drop out of school after only two months because he now has to help his father keep the animals. He thus grows up in isolation, far from human society. It is thanks to military service at the age of 21 that he can escape his father's grip. He learns to read, which is for him a revelation (he will become a linguist), and when he leaves the army, he rejects the report of quasi-slavery imposed by his father.

During World War II, Antonio (Nino Manfredi), Gianni (Vittorio Gassman) and Nicola (Stefania Sandrelli) are activists fighting for Italy's liberation from Nazi occupation. When the war ends and their ideals must change, the three men take different life paths. Antonio and Nicola incorporate their beliefs into adulthood, whereas Gianni takes a more affluent job as a lawyer's assistant. When the group reunites after several decades, their discourse unearths hostility and unsettling realizations.

The first novel by Elena Ferrante in the adaptation by Mario Martone. What happened to Amalia? Who was with her the night she died? Is Amalia, as the last hours of her life suggest, the woman her daughter Della has always imagined: equivocal, satisfied, predisposed to secret deviances and able to escape her husband's obsessive surveillance?

Let’s imagine that there is a new craft, and that it is called "replacing". Let’s imagine an unemployed man who would practice such craft every day. So much so, that he would actually work beyond measure, and that he would be, in his own way, a happy man. All he does is take on, for a few hours, the role of absentees who duck - for more or less serious reasons, their official occupation. He makes do with just enough, our hero, because money isn’t everything in life: one needs to keep in shape, and not letting oneself go in times of, how to say, dark crises. Let’s imagine, also, that there is a twenty years old young man (his son) who plays the sax like a God, and is therefore lucky, as he is an artist. Let’s then imagine Lucia, restless and wary, that hides a secret behind her desire to get ahead. Will they get to the next episode safe and sound?

Emma has left Russia to live with her husband in Italy. Now a member of a powerful industrial family, she is the respected mother of three, but feels unfulfilled. One day, Antonio, a talented chef and her son's friend, makes her senses kindle. Director Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me by Your Name", "Challengers") thought long and hard about whether he would rather become a chef or a filmmaker. "I Am Love" is a cinematic feast that captivates the viewer from the very first minute with its hypnotic and erotic images, featuring a brilliant Tilda Swinton.

Andrei Gortchakov, a Russian writer, travels through Italy in the footsteps of a fellow composer to write his biography. With great sensitivity for the emotions of those who are far from their country, Andrei Tarkovski, supported by his Italian co-writer Tonino Guerra, draws a meeting of cultures and periods.

Between the autumn of 1897 and the summer of 1898, four families live together on a farm near Bergamo in the Bassa Bergamasca. Among the members of the community there is a deep spiritual connection that leads them to experience beautiful and tragic things, ordinary moments and extraordinary events together. Two young people court each other and marry; a penniless father secretly cuts down a tree to carve new wooden shoes for his son, who goes to school six kilometres a day; an old man fertilizes his tomatoes with chicken excrement so that they ripen faster. Ermanno Olmi's L'albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) is an almost documentary chronicle of everyday farming life at the end of the penultimate century, epically laid out and following the rhythm of the seasons. Winner of the Palme d’Or Cannes in 1978.

Bernardo Bertolucci was obviously influenced by the films of Jean-Luc Godard and the worldwide political upheavals of 1968 while assembling his feature-film Partner. This unorthodox adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Double studiously avoids traditional linear storytelling and exposition techniques. Pierre Clementi stars as a repressed young student who concocts a radical alter ego for himself. As the student's two faces argue polemics, Bertolucci uses the opportunity to take freewheeling critical potshots at all forms of political ideology. Not all of Partner makes sense, but the film will command the viewer's interest from beginning to end.

A journey into the world and the work of the great master of the South American cinema, Fernando Birri. As Birri said, it’s his "spiritual kino last will".