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.
A disc jockey, a pimp and an Italian tourist escape from jail in New Orleans.
Roberto Benigni adapts the classic children's tale by Carlo Collodi for the big-budget family-oriented comedy Pinocchio.
Love and injury in time of war. Attilio de Giovanni teaches poetry in Italy. He has a romantic soul, and women love him. But he is in love with Vittoria, and the love is unrequited. Every night he dreams of marrying her, in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, as Tom Waits sings. Vittoria travels to Iraq with her friend, Fuad, a poet; they are there with the second Gulf War breaks out. Vittoria is injured. Attilio must get to her side, and then, as war rages around him, he must find her the medical care she needs. In war, does love conquer all?
A vicious serial sex killer is on the loose, and landscape gardener and shop-window outfitter Loris is the prime suspect, thanks to his unfortunate habit of getting caught in compromising situations (for which there is always a totally innocent explanation that the police fail to spot). Undercover policewoman Jessica is assigned by eccentric police psychologist Taccone to follow Loris.
In Memphis, Tennessee, over the course of a single night, the Arcade Hotel, run by an eccentric night clerk and a clueless bellboy, is visited by a young Japanese couple traveling in search of the roots of rock; an Italian woman in mourning who stumbles upon a fleeing charlatan girl; and a comical trio of accidental thieves looking for a place to hide.
Good hearted but not very wordly-wise, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.
A woman comes across the difficulties of modern work: to force her to resign from her job, her firm tries all the humiliation techniques known as "mobbing". The film is based upon real cases reported by Italian unions.
Lisbon, 1938. Mr. Pereira is the editor of the culture section of an evening paper. Although fascism is on the rise in Europe, like in nearby civil war Spain or even inside Portugal itself in the form of Salazar's regime, Pereira only concerns himself with writing bios and translating French novels. Things change after he hires a young writer as his assistant, getting to know also his girlfriend – both opponents to the regime – and reluctantly helps them when they begin to get in trouble for subversive activities. Eventually, he's forced to take a stand...
From childhood to fatherhood, Piero learns things the hard way while growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Livorno.
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.
Four lighthearted stories set in the idyllic Italian countryside: an old grouch is befriended by a stray dog; a lonely widow spies on her newly-wed son and daughter-in-law; a German tourist tries to seduce a younger nurse. The fourth segment was cut in the US by its distributor Miramax.
Young terrorist Laura shoots both a judge and a comrade, and over time her violent act becomes a thread linking the lives and fates of several other women. Each has her own secret, including the lawyer who listens to Laura as if in a ‘trance’: moments before, she discovered her husband was cheating.
The illegitimate son of Inspector Clouseau is on the case of the kidnapped Princess Yasmin.
November 2, 1975: Pier Paolo Pasolini is murdered in the outskirts of Rome. The suspect, a 17-year-old hustler, pleads to have acted in self-defense, citing Pasolini's notorious sexual habits as proof. However, many inconsistencies start to undermine his version, pointing to him not having acted alone or even being assaulted in the first place. Was Pasolini also killed for another reason?
The humanitarian aid expedition "Angeles Azules" (Blue Angels), comprising twelve Europeans and six trucks loaded with provisions to alleviate hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, advances across the continent. As a result of the difficulties the team encounters, disorganization gradually takes over the convoy. Each of the members of the group, little by little, yield to their petty, selfish impulses: violence, power, nostalgia - The breakdown of one of the trucks forces Michele and Nadia to wait at an oasis for the arrival of spare parts. But a starving local tribe settles threateningly near them. The chief of the tribe makes a speech they don't understand, which is followed by a macabre purification ceremony.
Father Maurice, a priest living in a residential college for priests in Rome, is called out one day to "exorcise" the devil from someone. The devil turns out to be in the form of a fun-loving man called Giuditta. What Father Maurice doesn't know is that this type of devil will turn his life around.
The story of Rudolf Nureyev, whose escape to the West stunned the world at the height of the Cold War. With his magnetic presence, Nureyev emerged as ballet’s most famous star, a wild and beautiful dancer limited by the world of 1950s Leningrad. His flirtation with Western artists and ideas led him into a high-stakes game of cat and mouse with the KGB.
The documentary focuses on Marco Ferreri and shows an unconventional man, extreme, provocative in ways, always a step ahead in its work, and often considered a visionary and experimental. The documentary honors the memory of a filmmaker too soon forgot that left an indelible mark in the seventh art.
Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.
An American couple drift toward emptiness in postwar North Africa.
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.