Davide Gemmani

Né terra né cielo

On July 19–21, 2001, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Genoa to protest against the ongoing G8 summit. Anti-globalization activists clashed with the police, with 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani shot dead after confronting a police vehicle. In the aftermath, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz high school, where around a hundred people between unarmed protesters—mostly students—and independent reporters who documented the police brutality during the protests had took shelter. What happened next was called by Amnesty International "the most serious breach of civil liberties in a democratic Western country since World War II."

Leftist radical-turned-terrorist Giorgio—who fled to Latin America in the '70s to escape justice—decides to surrender after hearing about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Determined to lead a comfortable, bourgeois life in his native Italy, he cuts a deal with a shady police chief, getting his sentence reduced in exchange for ratting out former comrades. Once released, Giorgio obsessively pursues his dream of becoming a "respectable" citizen, even if the way is paved with larceny, pimping, drug-dealing, rape, heist, and murder...

When a producer refuses to cut Massimo and his band a record unless they hire an "ethnic" singer to spice up the act, he tries to seduce Jing, a Chinese girl with a beautiful voice disinterested in both him and rock, to get her on board. She pretends to cave in in order to escape an arranged marriage, but in the weeks preceding the concert the two begin to grow closer, complicating the secretly fake nature of their relationship.

The Pantani case, a film directed by Domenico Ciolfi, tells the story of the last five years in the life of the cyclist from Romagna, in particular from 5 June 1999, when he was suspended from racing, to 14 February 2004, the day of his death. His untimely death in unclear circumstances, which have opened several judicial inquiries, was a shock to the world of cycling, which lost its Pirate on Valentine's Day. The film is a tribute to this Italian sporting hero, remembering him as a young man who, riding his bike, reached several milestones but was defeated in a fatal match.

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.

Fosca Innocenti