Beautiful Islands

Opening this weekend: Beautiful Islands, directed by Tomoko Kana

Synopsis from the movie's website:

This movie looks at three beautiful islands, shaken by climate change: Tuvalu in the South Pacific, Venice in Italy, and Shishmaref in Alaska.

The islands all have different climates and cultures, but the people all love their native lands. The film, which took three years to shoot, focuses on their daily lives. It portrays festivals that foster ties among the people, traditional crafts which have been passed on for generations, and peaceful lives by the water. They are all disappearing by climate change.

When these people lose their homelands, their cultures and histories face “death.” Their lives in the midst of all the changes suggest where our future leads..

Director, Kana Tomoko purposely decided not to put any narration or music in this film. It is a two-hour trip around the world, listening to the sounds of waters and winds, accompanied by the children’s smiles. She wants you to sharpen your minds and feel what we are going to lose as climate change really (threatens) hits our planet.

Draquila - Italy Trembles

Showing at the Cannes Film Festival: Draquila - Italy Trembles, directed by Sabina Guzzanti

Synopsis from the Cannes website:

Why do Italians vote Berlusconi? The violence of propaganda, the impotence of citizens, questions of the economy, illicit power relationships...

And a catastrophe: the city of L'Aquila devastated by an earthquake... all these combine to show how the young Italian democracy has been subdued. The caricature of Berlusconi - one of the director’s most celebrated impersonations - strolls through Aquila’s refugee camp and wanders the deserted town like an emperor at the end of his reign. A town devastated by an earthquake - the perfect location from which to recount Italy’s drift into authoritarianism, the mess of blackmail, scandal, swindles and inertia of the political classes, the media and the citizens, that have paralysed the country. Why do the Italians vote for Berlusconi? Why do they consider democracy an unsuitable system of government? Aquila - this magnificent city laid low by an earthquake - will give us the answers. Why did the proud people of Aquila exchange their most precious commodity - their community, a dynamic town full of students and works of art - for a little apartment in a dormitory town, furnished by Berlusconi? Why did they believe TV propaganda rather than the evidence of their own eyes? And how did it happen to others too, as quickly and as deceitfully? Who was leaning on them? The days of Berlusconi’s reign seem numbered: it’s time to search through the rubble and draw what conclusions we can.

Guzzanti's website is here.

Come l'ombra / As the Shadow

Showing at the Mar del Plata Film Festival: Come l'ombra, directed by Marina Spada

Synopsis from AllMovie.com:

A bored Italian travel agent agrees to take in the cousin of a handsome Ukrainian teacher she has recently become acquainted with, only to find her generosity propelling her into a dark mystery in director Marina Spada's sophisticated sophomore outing as a director. Claudia (Anita Kravos) spends her days working and her weekends visiting her sister and parents. In her spare time Claudia has taken to studying Russian. When Claudia catches the eye of charming Ukrainian professor of languages Boris (Paolo Pierobon), who has only recently arrived in Italy and has taken to offering language lesson as a means of making ends meet, the pair immediately make a connection and their relationship gradually begins to grow deeper. Their bond seemingly solidified, Boris soon approaches his newfound friend with the prospect of putting up his Ukrainian cousin Olga (Karolina Dafne Porcari). Though Claudia readily agrees under the stipulation that the arrangement only be for a few days, the bond between the lonely Italian and the amiable language teacher soon expands to include the newly arrived, beautiful blonde until one day Olga goes mysteriously missing. Now determined to find out just what fate befell her amiable temporary roommate, Claudia sets out to discover the truth behind Olga's perplexing disappearance.

Ragazze – La vita trema

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Ragazze – La vita trema, directed by Paola Sangiovanni

Synopsis from the Venice Days’ website:

Alessandra, Maria Paola, Marina and Liliana come from different geographical, cultural and social milieu and their lives crossed or just grazed each other in Rome between the end of the 1960s and the 1970s. Their stories, told in first person today, are rounded out by vivid and present images from public and private archives. It is a subjective telling. The “starting with one’s self,” which formulated spontaneously during the feminist movement and set the foundation for a new political practice, today becomes historical narrative. The idea of a new world – in which there would be no violence or bullying of one person by another – bloomed simultaneously in the breasts of nearly an entire generation throughout the country. Thus, the film unfolds along the parallel track of women’s history as well, touching upon the consciousness of one’s self as a woman, self-consciousness, love, violence against women, divorce, contraception, abortion, work, theatre, free radios, squatting, the displacement of personal experiences into collective ones for a more humane world, of women and men, girls and boys.

You can watch a trailer here.

Daimon / Cock-Crow

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Daimon and Cock-Crow, directed by David Zamagni and Nadia Ranocchi

Synopses (of a sort) from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Daimon

Daimon is a sort of filmed screenplay for a visionary imaginary biography of Georges Bataille. Daimon is an invitation to open your eyes to the point of nausea, to consider eroticism gravely and tragically. Eros is the daimon par excellence, but the term does not simply indicate a divine figure, its etymon evokes the lacerator, the one who divides and breaks up. The leitmotiv of Daimon is therefore tension, a conflict impossible to resolve which is intrinsic to human nature, insoluble nature as the source of glory and ecstasy, of laughter and tears. Eroticism, sacrifice, joy, horror and death are the elements that determine the division of Daimon into sequences. The sum belongs to the sphere of the impossible.

Cock-Crow

Every era generates and cultivates its dragon. Mysterious unknown powers that determine the simplest everyday gestures of a humanity deprived of any natural quality, men for whom their own bodily existence becomes a ruthless battlefield. A depth that is impossible to gauge and therefore admitted to participate in the economy of the sacred. Cock-Crow materializes the dreams of a boy who is guilty of what he sees. It is the fall into an anterior world, a place of non-consolatory object-images.

Deserto Rosa – Luigi Ghirri

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Deserto Rosa – Luigi Ghirri, directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi

Synopsis from Sgarbi’s website:

Accostarsi alle fonti dell'emozione, criterio-guida fondamentale di tutta l'opera del grande fotografo Luigi Ghirri: questo è l'obiettivo del film. L'estremo progetto di Luigi Ghirri, purtroppo non realizzato, era una "casa delle stagioni": acquistare un casolare, che compare nelle ultime opere del fotografo, nei pressi della sua casa di Roncocesi, e allestirvi mostre legate, ciascuna, alla stagione corrente, in modo da creare una stretta relazione tra tempo naturale e tempo dell'arte.

A questo progetto interrotto si ispira Deserto rosa, in cui la telecamera 'visita' una serie di paesaggi fotografati da Ghirri appunto secondo l'alternarsi delle stagioni: Primavera, Estate, Autunno, Inverno e Primavera notturna.

Aleksandr Sokurov racconta ciascuna stagione rappresentata nel film, focalizzando in forma narrativa la il sentimento della ciclicità del tempo di Luigi Ghirri.
Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri lo ha così raccontato "Luigi Ghirri era sempre là, sospeso su quella fune sopra a un campo innevato, sulla terra arata o confuso nella nebbia, sempre un po' più in alto di me anche sulle spiagge dell'Adriatico nella luce del tramonto estivo che regala a questo mare il turchese e lo smeraldo."


Hmm. The Venice Film Festival's website also includes an English version:

The purpose of the film is to approach to the sources of emotion, which is the essential guide-line of the great photographer Luigi Ghirri’s whole work. Luigi Ghirri’s ultimate project, which unfortunately has not been realized, was a “house of seasons”: he planned to buy a cottage— appearing in his last works—near his house in Roncocesi, with the aim of using it as a space for the staging of a series of exhibitions, each related to the going season, in order to establish a relation between the time of nature and the time of Art. Deserto Rosa is inspired by this interrupted project: the camera “pays visit” to a sequence of landscapes photographed by Ghirri just following the season rotation: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Night Spring. Aleksandr Sokurov describes every season represented in the movie, focusing in a narrative form the feeling of time blindness that belonged to Luigi Ghirri. Paola Borgonzoni Ghirri described him as follows: “Luigi Ghirri was always there, walking on a rope over a snowy meadow, on a ploughed field or vanishing in the fog, always a little higher than me even on the Adriatic beaches, in the light of one of those summer sunsets, that give this sea his hues of turquoise and emerald.”

Poesia che mi guardi

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Poesia che mi guardi, directed by Marina Spada

Synopsis from the website for Venice Days:

Beginning with Antonia Pozzi, an original and passionate Italian poet of the 20th century, who killed herself at the tender age of 26 in 1938, Poesia che mi guardi reflects upon the role of the artist and poet in society, then and now. The film gives voice to her poetry and her tormented existential search, her wariness towards men, who dismissed her poetic talent as an emotional disorder, and towards her social environment, Milan’s upper class, which kept her from living her life with sincerity and passion. The driving force and narrator of the film is Maria, a filmmaker who, fascinated with Pozzi, studies and her work and researches the world and people of her life. A decisive moment for Maria comes when she meets a group of university students who write their poems anonymously on walls around Milan, convinced that in our lives there is always a great need for poetry. Maria involves them in her project: she wants Antonia Pozzi’s poetry to be revived in Milan through the students, no longer as a solitary and intimate expression, but as a shared moment. She wants this action to redeem Antonia Pozzi, to give her the recognition and visibility denied her when she was alive.

Vittorio D

Showing today at the Venice Film Festival: Vittorio D, directed by Mario Canale & Annarosa Morri

Synopsis from a related IndieWire article:

Seventy years after his first film (Red Roses, 1939) and 35 after his death, Vittorio De Sica remains a celebrated, forgotten and perhaps unknown giant of Italian cinema. His irrepressible humanity, versatility as an actor and intransigence as a filmmaker remain in the shadows. This original and different portrait is created through stories from De Sica’s children — Emy, Christian and Manuel — alongside artists such as Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, John Landis, Ken Loach and Mario Monicelli.

Lo spazio bianco

Showing at Venice Film Festival today: Lo spazio bianco, directed by Francesca Comencini

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival’s website:

Maria is waiting for a little girl; she is no longer pregnant but is waiting anyway. She is waiting for her daughter to be born or to die. If there is one thing Maria is unable to do, it is to wait. This is why these three months that she has to face, alone, waiting for her daughter Irene to come out of the incubator, have caught her unawares. Used to relying exclusively on herself and taking all decisions by herself, Maria forces herself into a passive state of apnea, excluding the whole world and imprisoning herself in the white space of waiting. However, this effort at painful isolation consumes the last ounce of strength she has: The bubble of isolation Maria has closed herself in is put to the test and finally explodes. Maria has to save herself if she is to save the child.

Galileo

Showing at the Venice Film Festival this weekend: Galileo, directed by Liliana Cavani (in 1968)

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

Galileo Galilei is in Padua where he teaches Physics at the University. This is where Giordano Bruno’s ideas and Copernicus’ principles on the solar system begin to take shape. Through lengthy studies, Galieo becomes convinced that it is the sun, and not the earth that is at the centre of the system of the universe. When summoned to Rome to explain his researches, he is asked by Cardinal Bellarmino and the Pope himself to defer these studies, since his theories border on heresy. It was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1968.

Clip (with Spanish subtitles):

Via della Croce

Showing this weekend at the Venice Film Festival: Via della Croce, directed by Serena Nono

Synopsis from the Venice Film Festival's website:

Via della croce is a film starring the guests of the Hospice at Sant’Alvise in Venice, a facility belonging to the Fondazione partecipazione Casa dell’Ospitalità that offers the homeless accommodation in Mestre and Venice. In the film the stations of the Via Crucis of Jesus Christ are portrayed by tableaux vivants, introduced by the Gospel according to John (from the Gospel according to Mark for the station of the Cyrene) and were filmed outdoors in Venice. The scenes interweave with the testimonies-vie cruces of the guests of Sant’Alvise. The themes of judgment, humiliation, poverty, charity, brotherhood, abandonment, death and resurrection through the voices of those who are hardly ever heard.

Sputnik 5 / Cosmonauta

Showing at the Venice Film Festival this weekend: Sputnik 5 and Cosmonauta, both directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli

Synopsis of Sputnik 5 from the Venice Film Festival's website:

In August 1960 the satellite Korabl- Sputnik 2 was sent into space, better known in the West as Sputnik 5. There were twenty-eight mice, two rats, two dogs, and around a hundred insects aboard. Sputnik 5 tells their tale.

Synopsis of Cosmonauta from the Venice Film Festival's website:

In the early sixties Arturo and Luciana, brother and sister and die-hard passionate communists, follow the progress of the space race together, urging on the Soviet cosmonauts. However as they grow up, the relationship between the two gets a little complicated: Luciana, an aggressive, unconventional adolescent, starts going out with boys and is ashamed of her odd brother, who shows no signs of growing up, possibly because of his epilepsy.

Trailer for Cosmonauta (in Italian, no subtitles):

La Pivellina

Showing at Cannes tonight: La Pivellina, written and directed by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel

From the film's website:

Abandoned in a park, the two-year-old girl Asia is found by Patti, a circus woman living with her husband Walter in a trailer park in San Basilio on the outskirts of Rome. With the help of Tairo, a teenager who lives with his grandma in an adjacent container, Patti starts to search for the girl's mother and gives the girl a new home for an uncertain period of time. La Pivellina is a film about a cosmos of outcasts in present-day Italy: a moving tale of courage and discrimination, of loss and togetherness, a look behind the corrugated-iron fence of a gated community.

This is the couple's first feature film; there is an interesting interview with them here.