FOCUS ITALY

Screening List：

RAINBOW - A PRIVATE AFFAIR

AFTER THE WAR

WHERE THE SHADOWS FALL

THE INTRUDER

SICILIAN GHOST STORY

RAINBOW - A PRIVATE AFFAIR (2017)

Directed by: Paolo Taviani / Vittorio Taviani

Starring: Luca Marinelli / Lorenzo Richelmy / Valentina Bellé 

Plot:

Summer 1943, Piedmont, Italy. Milton loves Fulvia who plays with his love: she only likes the depth of his thought and the letters he writes to her, but his better-looking best friend Giorgio seems to be equally attractive in her affections. A year later, war has invaded the idyllic villa on the hill and Fulvia has left for Turin. Both Milton and Giorgio have joined the anti-Fascist resistance movement. Milton has joined the Resistance and fights beside other partisans. He learns during a conversation that Fulvia was secretly in love with his best friend Giorgio. Milton decides to go find Giorgio in the Langhe region of Italy with all its misty hills...But Giorgio has just been arrested by the Fascists. 

AFTER THE WAR  (2017)

Directed by: Annarita Zambrano

Starring: Giuseppe Battiston / Barbora Bobulova / Charlotte Cétaire / Fabrizio Ferracane 

Plot:

Bologna, 2002. The opposition to the Labor Law explodes in universities. The murder of a judge reopens old political wounds between Italy and France. Marco, a former far left-wing activist, sentenced for murder and exiled in France for 20 years, thanks to the Mitterrand doctrine (a policy that allowed convicted terrorists from Italy’s far-left to remain in exile in France and avoid extradition back home), is accused of having ordered the attack. The Italian government requests his extradition. Forced to flee with Viola, his 16-year-old daughter, his life will change forever, as well as his families in Italy who have to pay for Marco's past faults.

WHERE THE SHADOWS FALL（2017）

Directed by: Valentina Pedicini

Starring: Elena Cotta / Federica Rosellini / Josafat Vagru / Lucrezia Guidone

Plot:

Anna and Hans, a nurse and her assistant in an old nursing home, have the souls of two "children" trapped in adult bodies. Trapped in time and space, they move about the rooms and gardens of what was once an orphanage, as if there were no more welcoming place on earth than the one that imprisoned them in childhood. From the past, Gertrude reappears – an old woman with a kind manner. Everything seems to precipitate; the ribbon of horror appears to be rewound. The evil is white, like the walls of the western wing, the torture area. The facility then loses its current shape and goes back to being what it was: a cruel shelter for Yenish children taken away from their families, the temple of a eugenics project spearheaded by Gertrude herself. The linearity of time seems to vanish when past and present is interwoven in this place of secrets and darkness...

THE INTRUDER (2017)

Directed by: Leonardo Di Costanzo

Starring: Raffaella Giordano / Valentina Vannino / Martina Abbate / Anna Patierno

Plot:

THE INTRUDER is a tale of conflict and danger set in present day Naples. Like a modern Antigone, a social worker on the frontline of the daily war against criminal mentality is confronted with a moral choice that can destroy her work and her life forever. She runs an after-school centre that takes care of underprivileged children, an oasis of creativity and play amid brutalist surroundings, where safety concerns are a constant for many families. One day, young Maria and her two children take refuge at the centre, and ask Giovanna for protection. It soon emerges that Maria has been hiding her Camorra lieutenant husband on the premises. Giovanna freely admits she was deceived by Maria, but she refuses to eject Maria’s family when her husband is arrested...

SICILIAN GHOST STORY (2017)

Directed by: Antonio Piazza / Fabio Grassadonia

Starring: Julia Jedlikowska / Gaetano Fernandez / Corinne Musallari / Andrea Falzone 

Plot:

SICILIAN GHOST STORY is inspired by the true story of teenager Giuseppe Di Matteo who was kidnapped in 1990s in a bid to silence his father, a Mafia informant. In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the code of silence and collusion that surrounds her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance. Only their indestructible love will be able to bring her back along. The film walks the line between reality and fantasy. With supernatural elements, it shows the warped relationships of a typical family, school and community.