Tonino Guerra
The relations between Parma and cinema were so strong for almost the whole of the twentieth century that this city became an early laboratory of ideas and theories on cinema and a set chosen by some of the greatest Italian authors and beyond. Furthermore, a considerable number of directors, actors, screenwriters and set designers were born in Parma who have made their way internationally, testifying to the fact that in this small city in Northern Italy there was a decidedly cinematic air. Red armchairs takes up the thread of this story, wondering why, unique among the Italian provincial cities, Parma has given so much to the cinema, accompanying the viewer on a journey backwards that from the first projections of the Lumière cinema reaches the ultramodern experience of new multiplexes. During this journey we will meet the characters who created the conditions for this diffusion of cinematographic culture in Parma.
Dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Andrei Tarkovsky. The film uses unique materials related to the years Tarkovsky spent in Italy, personal accounts of friends and professionals, the shooting locations of his films, to what degree his works reflects his personal life. The film brings us closer to the man to whom contemporary filmmaking owes so much.
The elegy film is dedicated to the memory of the remarkable Soviet and Russian poet, translator and writer of the second half of the twentieth century, Bella Akhmadulina.
Scriptwriter, author, artist, sculptor, dramatist, architect, journalist, constructor, philanthropist, pedagogue, metalworker, inventor, public figure, agriculturist, gardener, chemist and simply a good person. He also plays football and the saxophone. In scale and versatility he is comparable to Leonardo da Vinci, but it is known that Leonardo could not play the saxophone, did not play football and did not write scripts. Tonino Guerra is the last representative of the Italian Renaissance.
Scriptwriter Tonino Guerra talks about his encounter with the artist Giorgio Morandi - a man who treated his paintbrushes as his best friends.
Eight months after the death of his wife, Frank Goode looks forward to a reunion with his four adult children. When all of them cancel their visits at the last minute, Frank, against the advice of his doctor, sets out on a road trip to reconnect with his offspring. As he visits each one in turn, Frank finds that his children's lives are not quite as picture-perfect as they've made them out to be.
A, an American film director of Greek ancestry, is making a film that tells his story and the story of his parents. It is a tale that unfolds in Italy, Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan, Canada and the USA. The main character is Eleni, who is claimed and claims the absoluteness of love. At the same time the film is a long journey into the vast history and the events of the last fifty years that left their mark on the 20th century. The characters in the film move as though in a dream. The dust of time confuses memories. A searches for them and experiences them in the present.
An intimate portrait of the legendary Italian screenwriter, poet, painter, ceramist, artist Tonino Guerra.
Greek Theo Angelopoulos traveling from Athens to Ostia, the Roman beach where Pasolini was killed. Far from there, in a Spanish train station, Víctor Erice wanders in an interview about the film resistance. And in Italy, Tonino Guerra, Ninetto Davoli and Nico Naldini lend his voice to the missing Passolini to close a historic triangle on film and solitude.
The story of a blind dervish named Bab'Aziz and his spirited granddaughter, Ishtar. Together they wander the desert in search of a great reunion of dervishes that takes place just once every thirty years. With faith as their only guide, the two journey for days through the expansive, barren landscape.
A jaded couple, Christopher and Chloë, whose relationship comes to a crossroads when both husband and wife become infatuated with the same woman, Linda.
A three-part anthology film about love and sexuality: a menage-a-trois between a couple and a young woman on the coast of Tuscany; an advertising executive under enormous pressure at work, who, during visits to his psychiatrist, is pulled to delve into the possible reasons why his stress seems to manifest itself in a recurring erotic dream; and a story of unrequited love about a beautiful, 1960s high-end call girl in an impossible affair with her young tailor.
This is the first film of Theo Angelopoulos' trilogy. The story starts in 1919 with some greek refugees from Odessa arriving somewhere near Thessaloniki. Among these people are two small kids, Alexis and Eleni. Eleni is an orphan and she is also taken care by Alexis' family. The refugees build a small village somewhere near a river and we watch as the kids grow up and fall in love. But difficult times of dictatorship and war are coming...
A long time ago, a young Russian general chose to sacrifice hundreds of birds to burn Moscow and save his motherland from the troops of Napoleon. For this feat, he was hailed as a hero by the people of Russia but regarded an executioner by the winged creatures. Now fifty years older the aging general leads a drab life. To make matters worse, the descendants of the sacrificed birds keep attacking him. One day however a meets an engaging little dog who soon becomes his faithful companion. Both friends decide to break the curse plaguing the general's life : they start militating for all the caged birds of Russia to be set free.
Alexander, a famous writer, is very ill and has only a few days to live. He meets a little boy on the street, who is an illegal immigrant from Albania. Alexander then takes the boy home.
A technical problem aboard a transatlantic flight forces a plane to land in Porto Santo, the small island of Madeira's archipelago where, according to a legend, Christopher Columbus the 15th century navigator, lived for a while and entertained a sexual relationship with a widow and her nubile daughter. A girl photo journalist profits to stay the extra-needed days for repair, to visit the island - and eventually she'll become part of complex relationships among some of the secluded people of the island. Also, a yacht lost in the high seas in 1947 reappears from the misty horizon 50 years later - to unite Fanny and João, a contemporary navigator.
Although liberated from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until October 19 of that year. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, he embarked on an arduous journey home in the company of Italian former prisoners of war from the Italian Army in Russia. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Russia, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany.
The film is a journey through a fantastic country in which the erotic images of the films of the great Federico Fellini came to life, and Tonino Guerra himself acted as a guide. The heroes of the maestro’s paintings are sailing on a ship to the Enchanted Island. There everyone goes ashore except two - Federico Fellini and Juliet Mazina. Their wanderings continue.
"A," a Greek filmmaker living in exile in the United States, returns to his native Ptolemas to attend a special screening of one of his extremely controversial films. But A's real interest lies elsewhere--the mythical reels of the very first film shot by the Manakia brothers, who, at the dawn of the age of cinema, tirelessly criss-crossed the Balkans and, without regard for national and ethnic strife, recorded the region's history and customs. Did these primitive, never-developed images really exist?
A documentary portrait of Michangelo Antonioni based on Roland Barthes' essay.
Made of four short tales, linked by a story filmed by Wim Wenders. Taking place in Ferrara, Portofino, Aix en Provence and Paris, each story, which always a woman as the crux of the story, invites to an inner travel, as Antonioni says "towards the true image of that absolute and mysterious reality that nobody will ever see".
Danny Cornish, a sort of stateless man who arranges art exhibits, is called from Tel Aviv to Paris with the news that a great uncle has died, in Birobidjan, the autonomous Jewish zone in Russia, leaving him a valuable art collection and the hand of a huge sculpture of a Golem. The uncle's will instructs Danny to find the rest of the statue, so Danny, who speaks no Russian, embarks on a trip that takes him (and the Golem's hand) to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, fumbling with hotel clerks, taxi drivers, and bureaucrats, following leads, and making discoveries about myth, story telling, art, and hope.
Alexandre, a TV reporter, is working for a few days in a border town, where a lot of refugees from Albania, Turkey and Kurdistan are packed in. Among them, he notices an old man and thinks he is an important Greek politician who disappeared mysteriously a few years ago. Back in Athens, he asks this politician's former wife to come and identify him. A slow and dry meditation about inhumanity of borders.
Carmine Bonavia wins election as the mayor of New York on a promise to legalize drugs. After the election, he marries Carrie and goes to his ancestral home of Sicily for their honeymoon. In his hotel, he meets Il Principe, a Sicilian prince who has spent years confined to the hotel because he crossed the Mafia. Amid the beauties of Sicily Carmine discovers that men of power will stop at nothing to prevent the legalization of drugs, which threatens their business.
Matteo Scuro is a retired Sicilian bureaucrat, a widower with five children, all of whom live on the mainland and hold responsible jobs. He decides to surprise each with a visit and finds none as he imagined.
Based on Leo Tolstoy's novel, Father Sergius, Night Sun stars Julian Sands as Sergio, a nobleman in 18th-century Italy who is expected to marry a duchess, Nastassja Kinski. Upon learning that she was previously the King's mistress, Sergio turns his back on society and becomes a monk. While at the hermitage he tries to resist all sexual temptations before him and soon becomes known as a miracle worker. Eventually he succumbs to a young seductress and knowing he is undeserving of the adulation, leaves the hermitage to travel around as a homeless beggar.
An older couple finally travels to the sea, reliving old memories along the way.
A woman, who has been the mistress of a man who has just died, thinks about leaving the little Italian village where they lived and moving to another place. An old and rich man offers her a place in his house, however, she will have to listen to him telling his past love stories.
Two children search for their father who is supposed to live in Germany. Their obsession for this father figure will take them to the boundaries between childhood and adolescence.
A bee keeper, Spiros, travels from the north to the south of Greece with his bees to meet the spring.
A 1988 documentary film directed by Alexander Sokurov, about the later life and death of Soviet Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was originally intended to mark the 50th birthday of Tarkovsky in 1982, which would have been before his death. Controversy with Soviet authorities about the film's style and content led to significant delays in the production.
This suspenseful Italian crime drama is set in a Colombian river town and chronicles the series of events that led up to murder. Based on a novel by distinguished author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the tale begins in the present as a middle-aged doctor returns to the village after a twenty-year absence to investigate the murder that occurred just before he left.
Amelia and Pippo are reunited after several decades to perform their old music-hall act, imitating Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, on a TV variety show.
A poetic and intimate scene-by-scene look into the filming of Tarkovsky's 'Nostalghia'.
An old communist returns to Greece after 32 years in the Soviet Union. However, things aren't the way he had hoped for.
During a costume party a wealthy young man falls off his horse and lands on his head, after which he believes that he is who he's dressed up as: 11th century Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. Twenty years later those who once called themselves his friends, with doctor in tow, return to his castle - where the servants continue the medieval costume charade and refer to the main character as "Your Highness" - in order to try to try to cure him of his insanity.
The travels in Italy of director Andrei Tarkovsky in preparation for the making of his film Nostalghia.
In 1914, a cruise ship sets sail from Naples to spread the ashes of beloved opera singer Edmea Tetua near Erimo, the isle of her birth. During the voyage, the eclectic array of passengers discovers a group of Serbian refugees aboard the vessel. Peace and camaraderie abound until the ship is descended upon by an Austrian flagship. The Serbians are forced to board it, but naturally they resist, igniting a skirmish that ends in destruction.
The Night of San Lorenzo, the night of the shooting stars, is the night when dreams come true in Italian folklore. In 1944, a group of Italians flee their town after hearing rumours that the Nazis plan to blow it up and that the Americans are about to arrive to liberate them.
The movie director Niccolò has just been left by his wife. Subsequently he embarks on an obsessive relationship with a young woman who eventually leaves him and disappears (shades also of L'Avventura) while searching for her, he meets a variety of other willing girls. This gives him the idea of making a movie about women's relationships. He starts to search for a woman who can play the leading part in the movie.
In a farmhouse in southern Italy, an old woman dies. Her husband summons their sons: from Rome, Raffaele, a judge facing a political case for which he risks assassination; from Naples, the religious and ideological Rocco, a counselor at a correctional institute for boys; from Turin, Nicola, a factory worker involved in labor disputes. Once home, each encounters the past and engages in reveries of what may come: Raffaele imagines his death, Rocco dreams of lifting the youth of Naples out of violence, drugs, and corruption, Nicola pictures embracing his estranged wife. Meanwhile, the old man and his young granddaughter explore the rhythms of the farm and grieve together.
A hunted man breaks into the castle at Oberwald to kill the Queen, but faints before doing so. He is Sebastian, the splitting image of the King who was assassinated on his wedding day. The Queen discovers that Sebastian once wrote a subversive poem that she liked, even though it was attacking her. The Queen dares Sebastian to kill her, otherwise she vows to kill him.
In the fascist Italy of 1935, a painter trained as a doctor is exiled to a remote region near Eboli. Over time, he learns to appreciate the beauty and wisdom of the peasants, and to overcome his isolation.
8 comic sketches set in Italy, with 4 of the most famous European sex symbols of the 70's playing 2 roles each.
On a stopover in Barcelona, Fériaud Roland discovers a corpse in the hotel room next door. He wakes up in a strange clinic without remembering who brought him there. The doctor insists he hallucinated, but it's not long before he obtains evidence that it wasn't a dream.
Five short comic sketches, all unrelated to each other, except that they are all expressions of Italian sexual humor.
A detective is assigned to investigate the mysterious murders of some Supreme Court judges.
Michael is the younger son of a middle-class family, a strong-willed and free-thinking fellow, who is off in some distant country fighting for a revolutionary cause.
During his preparation for his film on Casanova Fellini asks a number of renowned actors to give him their view on the character of Casanova.
Documentary produced by Italian television about the production of Federico Fellini's film Amarcord (1973).
Lucky Luciano is one of the bosses of the Mafia. He orders the slaughter of 40 other responsibles, therefore becoming the only boss. But a few years later he is put into jail. In 1946, he got a pardon and is sent back to Sicilia. There, he begins becoming one of the chief of the Mafia. The US Army seems to refrain from interfering.
In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.
Sister Germana, a beautiful woman who took the vows following the death of her fiancé Guido, is forced to return from Libya, and becomes the mother superior in a hospital in Lombardy. A young Communist, pretending to be sick, has established himself in the hospital where he has been for some time now, though he tries to make himself useful in whatever way he can. Realizing that the nun does not tolerate his presence, the young man leaves the hospital, and in order to make a living, busies himself as a ‘nurse’ in the town. During the course of a strike, he is wounded. He is brought to the hospital where he is reconciled with the mother superior...
Enrico Mattei helped change Italy’s future, first as freedom-fighter against the Nazis, then as an investor in methane gas through a public company, A.G.I.P., and ultimately as the head of ENI, a state body formed for the development of oil resources. October 27, 1962, he died when his private airplane crashed, one minute before it should land at Milan airport. Officially, he died of a flight accident. Actually, many journalists explored other plausible reasons for the untimely landing of the small aircraft.
A few days after the arrival of the year 1000, bearer of great misfortune according to the Prophets, the cavalryman Fortunato and two soldiers, Pannocchia and Carestia, travel through Italy in the midst of numerous adventures: The prophetic year is marked only by the discovery on the part of the cavalryman of his wife's betrayal
Forty-year-old Sandro (Marcello Mastroianni) is married to Claude (Virna Lisi). Sandro has one strange obsession: he is a self confessed voyeur. He films his wife in all walks of life on his wobbly hand held camcorder. But everything changes when Mark (Timothy Dalton) enters their life. Written by Steven Dixon
On the Italian/Austrian front during World War I, a disastrous Italian attack upon the Austrian positions leads to a mutiny among the decimated Italian troops.
An epic portrait of late Sixties America, as seen through the portrayal of two of its children: anthropology student Daria (who's helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert) and dropout Mark (who's wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot)...
At the end of World War II, Giovanna, a war bride living near Milan refuses to accept that her husband, Antonio, missing on the Russian front, is dead. There's a flashback to their brief courtship near her hometown of Naples, his 12-day leave to marry her, ruses to keep from deployment, and the ultimate farewell. Some years after the war, still with no word from Antonio, Giovanna goes to Russia to find him, starting in the town near the winter battle when he disappeared. Armed with his photograph, what will she find?
Young Catherine Morelli, who lives in Rome, goes to Geneva to find romance at her father's wedding. There she begins a near nymphomaniac pursuit of a mystery man called Gregory.
When her husband returns from his work abroad with a guest, a young girl, his wife suspects a liaison. She leaves her home. Her boss takes her to the Côte d'Azur. They get closer during the long voyage and the man invites her to his marital home.
A painter facing a creative block arranges to spend the weekend in the country at his mistress's villa. While staying there, his sanity begins to disintegrate.
Globe-trotting clothes-horse Julia, who's harboring a secret, embarks on a 10-day fling with Valerio in Italy.
A businessman is nicknamed "L'avvocato" and his driver, Oscar, is a yes-man. When L'avvocato has a crash while driving his car, Oscar is put in jail in his place. When Oscar gets out, he finds himself married to the beautiful Maria, but he can't even touch her: she is l'avvocato's lover. Afterwards Oscar is appointed manager, but he can't manage a dime. At the end he shall find himself again in jail, hoping that his "sissignore" (yessir) will let him have, sometime, a driver to send to prison in his place. —
A fairy tale of the misadventures of a beautiful but temperamental Neapolitan peasant, Isabella, when she meets the ill- tempered Spanish Prince Rodrigo Ferrante y Davalos. The King of Spain has ordered Rodrigo to choose a wife among seven Italian Princesses, but he is smitten by the lowly peasant.
Pasquale and Maria, husband and wife, live in a palace supposedly haunted by ghosts and pay no rent. When Pasquale finds some food in the cupboard he thinks the ghosts are at work.
A film documentarian stops at nothing to record unusual and supposedly true-to-life situations.
Bob is a successful actor, but his career gets doomed by a strange phenomenon: the animal kingdom is taking on him!
A behind-the-scenes documentary about director Michelangelo Antonioni as he's shooting his segment of The Three Faces, a vehicle for Soraya, the former empress of Persia. Featuring interviews with Monica Vitti, Tonino Guerra and more.
A successful mod photographer in London whose world is bounded by fashion, pop music, marijuana, and easy sex, feels his life is boring and despairing. But in the course of a single day he accidentally captures on film the commission of a murder. The fact that he has photographed a murder does not occur to him until he studies and then blows up his negatives, uncovering details, blowing up smaller and smaller elements, and finally putting the puzzle together.
In the near future, big wars are avoided by giving individuals with violent tendencies a chance to kill in the Big Hunt. The Hunt is the most popular form of entertainment in the world and also attracts participants who are looking for fame and fortune. It includes ten rounds for each competitor, five as the hunter and five as the victim.
In Naples, in the Second World War, the wolf businessman Domenico Soriano meets the seventeen years old whore Filumena Marturano in a brothel during an allied bombing. Two years later, in the post-war, they meet each other by chance and begin a long affair. For twenty-two years, Filumena is his mistress and administrates his shops in Naples while Domenico is traveling. When Domenico decides to marry the young cashier of his bakery, Filumena lures him as if she were near to death and he marries her. Later he annuls their matrimony, and she tells him that she has three sons that she raised secretly, one of them is his legitimate son but she does not disclose his identity. The middle-age Domenico uses the most different subterfuges trying to find which teenager might be his son.
A vivid assortment consisted of three acts taken from the lives of modern 1960s Italians, always in orbit around the restless theme of sexual inhibition and the pursuit of pleasure in sex.
Amid the modern wastelands and toxic factories of Italy, wife and mother Giuliana desperately tries to conceal her tenuous grip on reality from those around her, especially her successful yet neglectful husband, Ugo. Ugo's old pal, Corrado, shows up in town on a business trip and is more sensitive to Giuliana's anxieties. They begin an affair, but it does little to quell Giuliana's existential fears, and her mental state rapidly deteriorates.
Commedia all'italiana consisting of a series of brief comic sketches based on manias, mainly sexual, featuring several figures of Italian society.
An aspiring young artist breaks from his wealthy, possessive mother to live a bohemian existence in the artist's section of Rome and falls in love with a beautiful model who wants an uncommitted relationship
This romantic drama by Michelangelo Antonioni follows the love life of Vittoria, a beautiful literary translator living in Rome. After splitting from her writer boyfriend, Riccardo, Vittoria meets Piero, a lively stockbroker, on the hectic floor of the Roman stock exchange. Though Vittoria and Piero begin a relationship, it is not one without difficulties, and their commitment to one another is tested during an eclipse.
A middle-aged plumber quits his job and questions his life after seeing somebody his own age suddenly die from a heart attack on his way to work.
A socialite is murdered and her playboy lover is brought in for questioning. During his stay in custody we get to see the real sneaky playboy in action via flashback. Is he guilty or just a sleaze.
Claudia and Anna join Anna's lover, Sandro, on a boat trip to a remote volcanic island. When Anna goes missing, a search is launched. In the meantime, Sandro and Claudia become involved in a romance despite Anna's disappearance, though the relationship suffers from guilt and tension.
Italy signed the armistice and in the general confusion a corporal decides to bring the tank back from the coast to the barracks.
A low level official and a prostitute both try to commit suicide and fail, afterwards he becomes a pimp and the prostitutes take over the country.
Italian director Giueseppe DeSantis was the creative force behind this Yugoslavian "slice of life" drama. The title translates as The Year-Long Road; accordingly, the plot concerns a joint, voluntary effort between Italy and Yugoslavia to construct a highway along the countries' Naturally, this animosity wreaks havoc on the various Romeo-Juliet romances in the region. All is resolved when oil is discovered on one of the islands. An American oil company is finally able to establish détente between the warring factions, smoothing the path for the long-delayed marriages of three young couples.
During a fair, a charlatan is able to sell to a group of retired persons a piece of sky that would give them a quiet place to live well after death. The old men buy the story and decide to commit suicide to get to the corner of heaven that belongs to them.
Two young hunters of wolves are involved in a conflict. Besides the dangerous wild wolves, beautiful Teresa is the center of attention.
