Rome, 1984, Aria is nine-year-old girl. On the verge of divorce, Aria's infantile and selfish parents are too preoccupied with their careers and extra-marital affairs to properly tend to any of Aria's needs. While her two older sisters are pampered, Aria is treated with cold indifference. Yet she yearns to love and to be loved. At school, Aria excels academically but is considered a misfit by everyone. She is misunderstood. Aria finds comfort in her cat - Dac and in her best friend - Angelica. Thrown out of both parents' homes, abandoned by all, even her best friend, Aria finally reaches the limit of what she can bear. She makes an unexpected decision in her life.

Overburdened and stuck in a greying marriage, Giovanna takes to caring for a Jewish Holocaust survivor her husband brings home. As she begins to reflect on her life, she turns to the man who lives across from her.

Vipera is the wife of a Sicilian smithy. She meets a man who shows her that life can be better and promptly leaves her husband and her little daughter.

Elena Serpieri is an Italian neurologist who is in the United States, because she obtained a scholarship in a New York hospital. There she works together with the FBI on the profile of a dangerous serial killer.

Sofia, a budding young theater actress, unwittingly discovers that Bruno, her beloved acting teacher, is gay. Heartbroken and determined to flee as far away from him as possible, she meets a young girl on the train who gives birth and abandons the baby. Sofia makes a life-changing decision: she takes the child and passes him off as her own son, naming him Bruno.

Giuseppe M. Gaudino made his directorial debut with this experimental film portrait contrasting the ancient Roman empire with poverty in present-day Naples. The film's narrator introduces the ancient town of Pozzuloi, home to Nero, his mother Agrippina, the Sibyl of Cumae, and Christian martyr Artema. This historical drama is intertwined with a modern-day story of a poverty-stricken family, forced by earthquakes during the '70s to move to the country, a devastating blow to the close-knit family. After a 1997 Venice Film Festival screening at 125 minutes, the filmmakers announced their plans to re-edit to a shorter running time. Also known as Moonspins Between Land and Sea.

This dark and intense drama follows the slow and painful destruction of a young, passive woman as she watches her family fall apart. Maria is the shy and dutiful daughter upon whose shoulders the family traumas have fallen. In addition to a regular job she cooks, cleans, and studies. Her parents offer no assistance as her father is blind, with a tendency towards violence when drinking. His wife, the focus of his violence is terribly unhappy. After a particularly brutal beating, Maria's brothers rise up against the father and end up leaving the home. It is up to Maria to try to bring the factions together. Maria's pressures increase after she calmly stabs her boss during an attempted rape, and then copes with her mother's suicide.

Michael Woods stars as Tony Giordani, a narcotics agent who learns that his wife has been murdered while he is recuperating from an attack by a mysterious stranger. His boss thinks it's a Mafia vendetta, but Tony follows the clues to an empty house which his wife had been photographing on the day of her murder. There, he finds a burned corpse and several clues leading to the Full Moon Killer, who has been decapitating prostitutes around the city. The owner of the house is an insane countess, whose escape from an asylum leads to yet another murder. Before long, Tony and his partner, Lisa, with whom he is engaged in a passionate affair, find themselves targeted for murder unless they can solve the case.

In the 18th century, English aristocrats had, among their better known strange customs, one really strange one: they kept "ornamental hermits" for their gardens. These were actual people who were willing to live in squalid conditions and serve as something like museum exhibits for the amusement of the wealthy. This movie takes that notion and transfers it to 18th century France. In the story, an English hermit Rupert Everett) has somehow been brought to France in the period following the French Revolution, and prior to the Napoleonic Era, a period (1795-1799) known as "The Directory." He eventually comes down out of his tree into a chateau owned by an Italian nobleman (Ugo Tognazzi) and his wife. Before long, the hermit has washed and bathed and become quite presentable, even charming. However, his appearance in their midst is like a sentence of death for many of those who associate with him.

An American ballerina arrives in Hungary to enroll in a ballet school and it soon becomes apparent that things are not what they seem.

This quickly-filmed avant-garde farce by prolific director Raul Ruiz features an insomniac (Michel Lonsdale) whose main preoccupation is surreptitiously watching private matters -- he is a voyeur. He and an equally disreputable acquaintance rape a woman alongside the Seine, a crime made all the worse because she is pregnant. The rest of this slow-paced film deals with the consequences of that action.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, two friends, one a homosexual and the other a writer, fall in love with a young divorced woman.

Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.

Short film showing cinematographer Henri Alekan, director Raúl Ruiz and actress Olimpia Carlisi at work creating sublime visual effects of the sort seen in City of Pirates.

The first movie directed by Roberto Benigni in four surreal short stories: "Durante Cristo" (During Christ), "Angelo" (Angel), , "In Banca" (At the Bank) and "I Due Militi" (The Two Soldiers). An excursus in Benigni's satirical views on man, religion and society.

Freely adapted from a story by Marcel Schwob in 'Screw imaginary' and deeply focused on the thought of Georges Bataille, the film wants to give substance to Clodia tragic affair, the Roman noblewoman loved by Catullo and made him immortal in his ways, with the Lesbia pseudonym.

The son of the owner of a large Italian cheese factory is kidnapped, but as the factory is on the verge of bankruptcy the owner hatches a plan to use the ransom money as reinvestment in the factory.

Rome, 1960. Four different people meet each other at the Olympics. They follow the games and become friends, talking about their sad lifes.

Eight Italian politicians from the communist party gather on a terrace in Rome for a get-to-gather. They discuss about their past, present and future.

'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.' (From "Landscapes of resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub" by Barton Byg)

Casanova is a libertine, collecting seductions and sexual feats. But he is really interested in someone, and is he really an interesting person? Is he really alive?

The 60-year-old Guido is in a life crisis after his wife left him. His search for her develops more and more into his search for himself and the confrontation with the question of the meaning of life ...

During his preparation for his film on Casanova Fellini asks a number of renowned actors to give him their view on the character of Casanova.

Paul is married, a successful engineer, and a conservative candidate in an upcoming local election. He falls in love with Adriana, a café waitress from Italy. Paul's party is very critical of foreign labour and wants to keep Switzerland to the Swiss. Where Paul falls deeper and deeper into the relationship and is ready to leave his wife, Adriana feels the social pressure growing and has to make her own decision.

Balsamo, a scoundrel with the gift of mesmerism, seeks to gain power in the French court in the days before the Revolution.

In 1972, what does making a film mean? How does a movie make? What is the relationship between the producer of shows and the spectator? How does meaning travel in the story? These are the questions posed and proposed by the film.

A young couple of burglars, waiting for trial, marry in jail. Annick writes down her observations of the women's ward. When she hears that her lover must serve a twice as long prison sentence, she plans their escape.

Psychiatrist takes young man to castle owned by strange woman, where the latter discovers he's the incarnation of a dead man.

Straub-Huillet’s first color film, adapts a lesser-known Corneille tragedy from 1664, which in turn was based on an episode of imperial court intrigue chronicled in Tacitus’s Histories. The costuming is classical, and the toga-clad, nonprofessional cast performs the drama’s original French text amid the ruins of Rome’s Palatine Hill while the noise of contemporary urban life hums in the background. Their lines are executed with a terrific flatness and frequently through heavy accents; the language in Othon becomes not merely an expression but a thing itself, an element whose plainness here alerts us to qualities of the work that might otherwise be subordinated.

Pisa, 1942. Marcella, Olimpia’s daughter, is suffering from meningioma. Her husband Pierluigi and her brother Daniel attempt to relieve Olympia’s grief from the imminent loss of the child.

A bombardier in World War II tries desperately to escape the insanity of the war. However, sometimes insanity is the only sane way to cope with a crazy situation.

Beatrice discovers the affair between her husband and the young wife of Ciampa, a man advanced in years and secretly resigned to that infidelity whose existence he openly denies. Beatrice, however, does not intend to do the same, on the contrary: she wants to publicly denounce that adulterous relationship.

Inspired by the writings by Robert Musil. Won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1968.

The Sanremo Music Festival is the most popular Italian song contest and awards, held annually in the town of Sanremo, Imperia, Italy, and consisting of a competition amongst previously unreleased songs. The Festival was the inspiration for the Eurovision Song Contest.