Italian cinema returns to London with the 16th edition of Cinema Made in Italy, opening on 4 March at BFI Southbank. Over five days, the showcase offers a concentrated look at the directions, tensions and obsessions shaping contemporary Italian filmmaking; an industry that continues to oscillate between tradition and reinvention.

Organised by Cinecittà in collaboration with the British Film Institute and the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the festival has gradually become a key outpost for Italian cinema abroad. More than a simple showcase, it functions as a barometer: each edition reveals where Italian filmmakers are heading, what themes they are confronting and how they are reworking the country’s long cinematic legacy.

The programme, curated by Film London CEO Adrian Wootton, brings together emerging directors and established auteurs, sketching a landscape that is stylistically varied and often surprisingly bold. One of the central presences this year is Valeria Golino, who appears in four titles across the programme: Fuori, A Brief Affair, Gioia, and Elisa. Her presence feels emblematic of the current Italian film scene: fluid between acting, directing and producing, Golino represents a generation of artists comfortable navigating different cinematic registers while maintaining a strong authorial identity.

Opening the festival is Damiano Michieletto’s Primavera, starring Michele Riondino and set in eighteenth-century Venice and centred on a young violin prodigy at the Pietà orphanage whose life is transformed by the arrival of Antonio Vivaldi. The premise echoes the tradition of Italian historical drama, yet the film leans toward a more intimate exploration of artistic awakening and the constraints imposed by social hierarchy.

Elsewhere, the programme moves across genres with a refreshing lack of rigidity. Laura Samani’s A Year of School revisits the coming-of-age story through the disruptive arrival of a Swedish student in an all-male class in Trieste, quietly dismantling the fragile codes of adolescent masculinity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Heads or Tails?, directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis, embraces the anarchic spirit of the Euro-western, openly drawing from Sergio Leone’s mythology while twisting it into something stranger and more playful.

A darker current runs through much of the programme. Ludovica Rampoldi’s A Brief Affair, her debut as a feature director, turns a clandestine relationship into a psychological trap, where desire gradually mutates into control and obsession. Known primarily for her screenwriting work, Rampoldi approaches the material with a cool, almost surgical sense of narrative tension. Leonardo Di Costanzo’s Elisa shifts the focus toward memory and responsibility. Set largely within the confines of a prison, the film follows a woman convicted of murdering her sister who claims to remember almost nothing of the crime. As she confronts the past with the help of a criminologist, the film unfolds as a study in repression and moral reckoning. Nicolangelo Gelormini’s Gioia ventures even further into uncomfortable territory, exploring a disturbing relationship between a high-school teacher and a troubled student. The film walks a fine line between melodrama and noir, exposing the emotional vacuum at the heart of its characters’ lives.

If there is a thematic thread running through the programme, it is the prominence of complex female characters. Mario Martone’s Fuori, inspired by the life of writer and activist Goliarda Sapienza, offers one of the festival’s most compelling portraits. After being imprisoned for theft, Sapienza forms unexpected bonds with younger inmates; relationships that challenge her sense of identity and ultimately rekindle her creative voice. Anchored by Golino’s performance, the film becomes a meditation on marginality, freedom and the fragile act of starting over. Margherita Spampinato’s Sweetheart explores generational conflict through a more intimate lens: a Milanese boy forced to spend the summer in rural Sicily with his deeply religious great-aunt. What begins as a clash between digital modernity and an almost timeless world slowly evolves into an unexpected emotional alliance.

The programme also acknowledges the past with a restored screening of Pietro Germi’s The Facts of Murder, a reminder of the intricate narrative craftsmanship that once defined Italian genre cinema. Seen alongside the new titles, the film highlights how contemporary directors continue to dialogue; sometimes consciously, sometimes indirectly, with the country’s cinematic heritage.

The festival closes with Isabel Coixet’s Three Goodbyes, adapted from Michela Murgia’s novel, a melancholic story of separation, illness and rediscovered desire. In many ways it encapsulates the mood of the entire line-up: intimate stories where personal crises become a lens through which to observe broader emotional landscapes.

More than a simple showcase, Cinema Made in Italy remains a revealing snapshot of a national cinema that refuses to settle into a single identity. Between genre experimentation, psychological introspection and political memory, the films presented in London suggest that Italian cinema today is less interested in nostalgia than in questioning its own traditions, and pushing them somewhere new.