Lucia Sardo

100 years ago, a terrible earthquake, followed by an equally terrible tidal wave, devastated and largely destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria.

This film depicts three episodes in the life of the highly eccentric, unabashedly homosexual Italian filmmaker Per Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini was best known to Americans for his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. However, in his native Italy, he was at least as well known for his writing and poetry as for his filmmaking. In the first episode, Pasolini (Marco Cavicchioli) waxes poetic about the beauty of young men during a visit to Sicily. The second and more interesting segment concerns a meeting with a young man who visits Pasolini thinking that though he is an old has-been, Pasolini may be able to do him a favor. Pasolini twigs to the boy's intentions, and a sparring session ensues. The final episode shows him picking up a young man at Rome's train station and the events that led to his beating death in 1975.

Set in the late 1960s, the film explores the issues of immigration, community values and family devotion through the eyes of a young girl, Lucia, who is left behind with her grandmother while her parents emigrate to France to find work. Lucia pains to be with her family as she struggles to learn her role in the tiny, traditional village under the watchful guidance of her stern grandmother.

Sulla giostra

Magic Show

Salvatore is a young orphan, living in Sicily with his little sister and his grandmother; after loosing his father in a tragic way he quits school and starts working as a fisherman and a farmer in order to support his little family. The Social Services soon discover the situation and resolve to put Salvatore in an orphanage, parting him from his family. Only a young, idealistic teacher (Enrico Lo Verso) tries to help him, going everyday after school to his house, to teach him the lessons he misses in the morning and to work with him in his greenhouse or on his fishing boat.

Ettore, a young boy in Sicily in the 50's, is surrounded by women and is always surprised by what is happening around him. In Milan a few years later Ettore is once again the center of attention and the hip crowd.

Peppino Impastato is a quick-witted lad growing up in 1970s Sicily. Despite hailing from a family with Mafia ties and living just one hundred steps from the house of local boss Tano Badalamenti, Peppino decides to expose the Mafia by using a pirate radio station to broadcast his political pronouncements in the form of ironic humour.

Riccardo, a southern man of solid principles and good feelings, decides to go and visit his daughter Aurora, who has been living in Barcelona for some time. There, however, a surprise awaits him: Aurora has married a woman. Indignant, Riccardo hastily returns to Italy, determined never to see her again. But perhaps destiny has decided otherwise.

Orlanda, Liuccia, Milù, Blu Blu and Veronica are five women in Palermo, Sicily, each different from the other. But, along with transvestite Kim and young man Maurizio, they all share something: they're "buttane", hookers, who spend the day between the streets and home; some got children, some got problems with the pimps, some with the clients...

Set in Sicily in the 1930's, Aurelio Grimaldi's feature debut chronicles the harsh story of twelve-year-old boy, Aclà, sold into slavery by his destitute parents to work in the underground Floristella sulfur mines. Overworked and underfed, Aclà toils from Monday to Saturday in the steamy, candle-lit labyrinths. Repeatedly beaten and abused by his "owner" and with constant threats of being raped, Aclà plots his escape to the sea...

In the northeast of Italy, the workers of a lingerie factory are about to be fired. Not far away, a handful of nuns, skilled in the art of embroidery and devoted to the Blessed Armida, risk being removed from their beloved convent. To oppose a destiny already marked, workers and nuns join forces and start a "business" outside the rules in the hopes that a miracle will help them keep the convent and the factory.

Inspired by Giancarlo Marinelli's novel "Amori in stazione", the film talks about the fate of marginalization in the decay of a small railway station, where prostitutes, homosexuals, pimps, conscripts, immigrants, gypsies and ordinary people meet. Characters out of time and space. Artificiality is their language to get out of the rawness of the landscape.

Seven people in a therapy group are forced to find new ways of coping with their problems when their therapist dies in the middle of a session.

Italo

Enza is a beautiful and lively Sicilian teenager who is starting out in life, but due to her naivety, she always ends up getting into trouble. She has no parents, but lives with her aunt and uncle together with her older sister who acts as her mother and tries to put her on the right path, even ending up in prison for some time. Enza, keeping faith with her rebellious nature, falls in love with Sebastiano, with whom she has her first sexual relations, but for him she also goes as far as stealing. All men are the same.

Davide is different from the other teenagers. Something makes him look like a girl. Davide is fourteen when he runs away from home. His intuition leads him to choose Villa Bellini, a park in Catania, as a refuge. The park is a world in itself, a world of the marginalized, to which the rest of the city turns a blind eye. But one day the past catches up and Davide has to face the most difficult choice, this time alone.

Maria Callas, one of the most talented opera singers of her time, seemed to have it all. Coming from humble origins, she always felt slighted by her mother's preference for her sister. She grew up in an unhappy environment, until her career in the operatic world took off. Aristotles Onassis also came from a poor Greek family. His ambition took him places where others dare not go and became a shipping magnate whose great wealth bought his entry into an international society he didn't ever dreamed of entering. These two powerful personalities were so much alike that their own passion served to destroy them.

La stanza dello Scirocco

A mafia killer accepts to take the identity of his last victim in order to redeem his past. Two games of chess - one with his victim, the other with his boss - will stress the turning points of this change. The killer meet his victim on a ship that carries back together in Sicily 40 years after their departure. Only one will arrive in Sicily, but he'll chose to change his life and complete the destiny of the other one.

It Happens in the Best of Families

6th January 1975, in an infant nursery in Palermo (Italy), for a mysterious reason, a male nurse exchanges the labels of baby number 7 and 8. Thirty-one years later Tommaso (7) and Daniele (8) meet each other by accident.

Inspired to a true story, on November 5th 1991, Rita Atria a young 17-year-old Sicilian girl, goes to see an anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino to denounce the Mafia system that was responsible for the murder of her father and her brother. It is the first time that such a young woman from a Mafia family rebels and betrays the Mafia. From that moment on, Rita's days are numbered. She only has nine months to live...

In the late 1980s, Amedeo Letizia, a young 20 something Italian, leaves his hometown of Casal di Principe to pursue a career in acting in Rome. While he's making his debut, his younger brother Paolo is kidnapped by armed men. Amedeo comes back, this return being an infernal descent into his past and his region's contradictions.

I baci mai dati

In the '70s, young Màrja leads a hippie lifestyle in Finland. During a peace march, she meets Fortunato, a young Sicilian, and falls in love with him. They marry and start a family, happily raising two daughters. However, times become hard and Fortunato suggests they move to his old town, where he can find work easily. Màrja accepts, but she'll have to clash with a close-minded and malicious environment as a foreigner in Southern Italy.

Three very different women who are hiding a secret are forced to work together to save their own skin.

During WWII, a teenage boy discovering himself becomes love-stricken by Malèna, a sensual woman living in a small, narrow-minded Italian town.

Il segreto dell'acqua

Don Matteo is a thoroughly ordinary Catholic priest with an extraordinary ability to read people and solve crimes. He’s a parish priest who never met an unjustly accused person he didn’t want to help.

Laura, a young noblewoman who grew up in a convent, is given in marriage to the baron of Carini, an overbearing and lustful man. The life of the young baroness seems destined for unhappiness until she meets Luca Corbara, who arrives in the country to find his origins.