Tender, devastating, moving: MEDITERRANEA

Jonas Carpignano‘s movie is one of the best evidence about immigration in Italy, especially in the south of the country, where we can meet thousands of Ayiva and Abas. Mediterranea starts with our two main characters, Ayiva and Abas precisely, who find themselves in Algeria, having left Burkina Faso and trying to get to the…

Let him go: THE WAIT

Juliette Binoche in Sicilian Pietro Messina’s movie The Wait is a grieving mother who can’t bring herself to tell her son’s French girlfriend that he’s died (here the link to the Festival screening). Anna (Binoche) lives in an enormous villa her Italian husband left to her in the shadow of Etna volcano. The movie starts with…

We are the last survivors: REMEMBER

Zev Guttman (an incredible Christopher Palmer)  is a 90-year-old widower falling prey with dementia. He lives in a nursing home with Max (Martin Landau). The both are Auschwitz survivor, the five numbers on their left forearms are there to remember it every time they want to forget. Zev escaped from Germany to the United States at the…

The test of fire: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD

Blood of my Blood is a summary of all Marco Bellocchio’s cinema. In this movie we find lots of Bellocchio‘s favourite topics: the figure of the brother who commits suicide (subject also used in Gli Occhi, La Bocca; but he was unhappy with the result), the topic of the two single sisters, his favourite city Bobbio where…

I play the orchestra: Steve Jobs

Danny Boyle’s movie closed the 59th London Film Festival as the best icing on the cake ever seen. True; this is a redundant story even on the big screen: Noah Wyle ( E.R.’s Doctor Carter) portrayed Steve Jobs in 1999 in the masterpiece Pirates of Silicon Valley. More recently, in 2013, Ashton Kutcher was Steve…

I swear my eternal virginity: SWORN VIRGIN

  In a Film Festival focus on gender that opened with Suffraggettes, Sworn Virgin by Italian director Laura Bispuri  is for sure a movie that can’t pass unnoticed. Bispuri‘s film (here our interview with her) tells about patriarchal Albanian tradition to ask whether renouncing sex can ever be the path to personal freedom. The movie…