Beautiful Families

This consists of four short films by different directors. Rosselini's 'Chastity' deals with an attractive air hostess who receives the unwelcome attentions of a middle aged American. Godard's 'New World' illustrates a post-apocalypse world the same as the pre-apocalyptic one but for an enigmatic change in attitude in most people, including the central character's girlfriend. In Pasolini's 'La Ricotta' (Curd Cheese), a lavish film about the life of Jesus Christ is being made in a poor area. The impoverished people subject themselves to various indignities in the name of moviemaking in order to win a little food. The central character is hoisted up on a cross for filming, and dies there. Finally comes Gregoretti's 'Free Range Chicken' in which a family of the materialist culture inadvertantly illustrate the cynical, metallic voiced doctrine of a top sales theorist.

Falling somewhere in-between a documentary and a droll drama (more like an enactment of reality, with a wink), this film by TV director Ugo Gregoretti looks in on a variety of social and ethnic situations throughout Italy. Sexual morés are contrasted, from the quaintly out-of-date courtship in Sicily to the sometimes uncomfortably explicit sexual references in the conversations of the youth at the opposite end of the country. Aside from these manners and morals, there is an examination of what happens when mechanized tools of production begin to take away from the human element at factories and in other industrial venues.

Five swindle stories, taking place in five international cities: Tokyo, Japan ("Fumiko's Five Benefactors" by Hiromichi Horikawa); Amsterdam, The Netherlands ("A River of Diamonds" by Roman Polanski); Naples, Italy ("The Road Map" by Ugo Gregoretti); Paris, France ("The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower" by Claude Chabrol); and Marrakesh, Morocco ("The Confidence Man" by Jean-Luc Godard). Godard's segment was not included in the original French cinema release, and Polanski's segment was not included on the 2016 home disc release.

Factory workers struggles over contracts in post-68 Italy documented through original footage.

Based on 1925 Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs, a zoologist finds a way to accelerate embryo growth in chicken eggs to help feed the population after the war. An unfortunate logistical accident makes the country swarmed with dangerous reptiles.

The film documents the trade union battle of the workers of the Apollon printing house in Rome, occupied for a few months after the management decided to fire all the personnel and sell the land on which the factory was standing.

Gregoretti's Il pollo ruspante ("Free Range Chicken") shows an Italian middle-class family with two children traveling via an autostrada (highway) to the site of a real-estate project where they could be interested in buying a detached house.

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