Ragazza del Lago (Girl by the Lake), 2007
Director: Andrea Molaioli
Language: Italian
Run time: 95 minutes
Availability: amazon.com in PAL format
Cast: Toni Servillo

As I was watching this film set in the Italian Dolomites, I kept thinking that the scenery was almost as beautiful as scenes I had experienced in mountainous Norway. This was obviously no coincidence as this film is based on the novel Don’t Look Back by the Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. A beautiful young woman is found murdered near a lake in a provincial town in northern Italy. Toni Servillo is excellent as the inspector who finds numerous suspects. The audience is kept guessing as he examines them all before reaching his final verdict.
- Recommended by Christine Foster Meloni, Culture Club Editor

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Le Amiche (Girl Friends), 1955
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Eleonora Rossi-Drago
Run Time: 104 minutes
Language: Italian

This film is based on the short story, "Tra donne sole," by Cesare Pavese. A native of Turin, Clelia goes to Rome to seek her fortune and she succeeds in obtaining an excellent job in the Italian fashion industry. When her employer decides to open a fashion salon in Turin, Clelia is chosen to manage it. The film focuses on Clelia and the new women friends she makes when she returns to her native city. It is interesting to view a film produced in the 1950s through the lens of feminism in the 21st century.
- Recommended by Christine Meloni, Culture Club Editor

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Notti Bianche (White Nights), 1957
Director: Luchino Visconti
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Maria Schell
Run Time: 101 minutes
Language: Italian

This film is based on White Nights, a novel by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Mario (played by Marcello Mastroianni) falls hopelessly in love with Natalia (Maria Schell) who is in love with a man who has disappeared. Mario tries to court her as she waits for her lover to return. It is a classic story of unrequited love.
- Recommended by Christine Foster Meloni, Culture Club Editor

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Un Difetto di Famiglia (Family Flaw), 2002
Director: Alberto Simone
Run Time: 108 minutes
Language: Italian

Un Difetto di Famiglia is a beautiful film that treats the subject of homosexuality with great sensitivity. It is basically the story of two brothers who have taken distinctly separate paths in life. Nicolo (played by Lino Banfi) is a successful businessman who is preparing to celebrate his daughter’s wedding to a wealthy general. Just before the wedding takes place, his 103-year-old mother dies and the wedding has to be postponed. The mother’s final wishes as set forth in her will force Nicolo to travel with his estranged gay brother (Nino Manfredi) to her final resting place in the south of Italy. It is heart-warming to watch the dramatic change in the life of the narrow-minded Nicolo.
- Recommended by Christine Foster Meloni, Culture Club Editor

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La Scorta
Director: Ricky Tognazzi 1994
Run Time: 92 minutes Italy
See English review below

Un famoso giudice viene assassinato a Trapani in Sicilia. Quattro poliziotti sono scelti per fare la scorta al nuovo giudice. Essi accettano questo nuovo incarico molto malvolentieri. Presto la scorta e il giudice cominciano a ricevere minacce di morte; la loro lealta e il loro impegno sono messi a dura prova . Questo film è basato su una storia vera.

English
A famous judge is murdered in the Sicilian town of Trapani. Four policemen are assigned to be the bodyguards of the judge who takes the murdered judge’s place. They take on their new assignment reluctantly. Soon the bodyguards and the judge begin to receive death threats, and their solidarity and resolve are severely tested. This exciting film is based on a true story.
- Recommended by Christine Foster Meloni, Culture Club Editor

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La Vita è Bella
Regista: Roberto Benigni (1997)
Run time: 114 minutes
See review in English below

Benigni è diventato un personaggio noto in America grazie allo successo di questo film personale, originale e audace, che ha scritto e diretto e in cui si presenta in divo con sua moglie reale, Nicoletta Braschi. Il film è una riaffermazione della vita in confronto all'inumanità, l'umiliazione, la solitudine, il desiderio impossibile, la sofferenza e la morte. Il protagonista è una figura tipo Charlie Chaplin (Guido Orefice) che usa l'umore di farsa grossolana a deridere e a parodiare la brutalità, il razzismo e la crudeltà dei Nazisti e i Fascisti, con l'aiuto dello zio, interpretato da Giustino Durano e l'amico Ferruccio (Sergio Bustric) che servono da contrappesi alle sue buffonerie. Nella seconda parte del film, Guido difende coraggiosamente sua moglie Dora (che l'accompagna in esilio benché gentile) e innanzitutto suo figlio Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini) dagli orrori del campo di concentrazione.

Benigni si è fatto criticare severamente d'aver preso alla leggiera il genocidio degli Ebrei, ma altri critici cinematografici affermano che lui ha dato al pubblico generale di spettatori accesso agli orrori dei campi di morte in modi personali che loro non hanno mai avuto prima, neanche col film Schindler's List. Benigni come cameriere a un ricevimento elegante libera la sua sposa futura, la "principessa," su un cavallo dipinto "ebraico," convertendo barriere sociali e pregiudizi in una favola. Hanno un figlio e trovano felicità, fino al periodo in cui i Nazisti e i Fascisti li perseguono cinque anni più tardi. Guido incontra le leggi antisemitiche e perfino la sua deportazione con incredulità, anzi accentando l'enormità iperreale e assurda di questi avvenimenti storici. La discontinuità iperreale e la disorientazione della sua esperienza si rivelano perfettamente nel personaggio del Dottor Lessing (Horst Buchholz) e i suoi indovinelli. Guido convertisce il campo di concentrazione in un gioco barocco per suo figlio, che finge di parteciparci mentre dubita di suo padre, nascondendosi dai Nazisti e alla fine trovando il premio promesso, il carro alleato che invade e libera il campo. La riunione finale con sua madre dopo la morte del padre riafferma la vita; Giosué è un figlio di Mosè, un eroe che menerà il suo popolo e abbatterà le mura del nemico.

English Review
Benigni has become a household word in America thanks to the success of this very personal and daring film, which he wrote and directed and stars in with his wife, Nicoletta Braschi. It is a reaffirmation of life in the face of inhumanity, humiliation, loneliness, longing, suffering and death. The hero is a Chaplinesque figure (Guido Orefice) who first displays slapstick humor mocking and parodying the brutality, racism and cruelty of the Nazis and Fascists (his uncle played by Giustino Durano and his sidekick Ferruccio played by Sergio Bustric are foils for his antics). In the second part of the film, Guido bravely defends his wife Dora (who goes along although a gentile) and especially his son Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini) from the horrors of the death camps.

Benigni has been severely criticized for making light of the plight of the Jews, but other viewers feel that he has given wide audiences access to the horrors of the death camps in personal ways they never had, even with Schindler's List. Benigni as a waiter at an elegant engagement party steals his future bride, the "principessa," away on a painted horse, converting social barriers and prejudices to a fairy tale. They have a son and find happiness, until the Nazis and Fascists close in on them five years later. Benigni encounters the antisemitic laws and even his deportation with disbelief, emphasizing the surreal enormity of those historic events. The surrealistic discontinuity and bewilderment of his experience are captured in the character of Dr. Lessing, played by Horst Buchholz. Guido turns prison camp into an elaborate game for his son, who goes along with it while doubting his father, hiding from the Nazis and at the end finding his promised prize, the allied tank which invades and liberates the camp. The final reunion with his mother after the death of his father reaffirms life; Giosué is a son of Moses, a Joshua who will lead his people and bring down the walls.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly, Italian Language Film Review Editor

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Amarcord (1973)
Director: Federico Fellini
Run time: 127 minutes
This classic Fellini masterpiece blends personal nostalgia of adolescence, quixotic events of family and village, against the backdrop of pre World War II fascist Italy. Perhaps, along with I Vitelloni, the most neorealist of Fellini’s films (most of which are oniric and subjective), Amarcord achieves the balance between black humor, comic absurdity, parody and caricature, and the painful heartstopping experiences of life, rites of passage which are archetypal. At the same time, the film is a very distinct portrait of a time and place. Amarcord, a semiautobiographical episodic drama, examines life in a small Adriatic village during Mussolini’s early reign in the 1930s. As the weather changes and spring arrives, the village holds a festival in which it burns a symbolic bonfire and celebrates new life. This gathering in the central square is the first of many others throughout the film. Each time the community assembles, its colorful members show themselves in full force, boasting their bizarre, disjointed personalities--and pure mischief is the result. Several of the village ladies wear their eyebrows penciled on in high, provocative arches, a style that seethes sex and drama, coaxing the camera to follow them. The film takes on a circusy, chaotic tone, making it difficult to see a clear plot structure; Amarcord instead breaks up into several memorably surreal sequences, a few of which follow a young man named Titta (Bruno Zanin) who wanders in and out of the animated provincial landscape, meeting assorted crazy characters and obsessing over sex. The beautiful clashes with the grotesque and politics and family matters blend together while sex is offset by violence in the inimitable style of Italy’s late master of cinema whose tour de force won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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Caro Diario (Dear Diary) - 1995
Director: Nanni Moretti
Run time: 100 minutes.
Nanni Moretti produced and stars in Caro Diario, a charming film with three autobiographical vignettes. This film is a must for anyone who likes Nanni Moretti and/or who loves the city of Rome. In the first vignette "On My Vespa" Moretti takes us on a marvelous tour of Rome, visiting his friends and favorite neighborhoods. In the second, "Islands", Moretti and a friend go in search of an island where Moretti can find peace and quiet in order to write. They are unsuccessful as they visit beautiful islands in the southern part of Italy. In the final vignette, Moretti demonstrates his frustration with doctors and medical treatments as he tries to find out what his strange illness is. While the themes of this film are serious, Moretti's compassion and humor are always visible.
-Recommended by Christine Meloni

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Cristo Si É Fermato A Eboli (Christ Stopped At Eboli) - 1979
Director: Francesco Rosi
Run time: 120 minutes
The leftist filmmaker Franco Rosi worked for years to make this adaptation of Carlo Levi's autobiographic novel, finally released for Italian television. It is Levi's story of his enforced exile in 1935-36 from Torino to Galiano in Lucania, the culture shock of a northern leftist intellectual artist doctor transplanted to a forgotten crumbling southern village full of ignorant superstitions and petty ambitions fueled by Fascists like the mayor Luigi Magalone. Levi, played by Gian Maria Volont�, provides food and art lessons for the town's children, companionship for the drunken exiled priest and for the locals at the caf�, and finally medical care, although he has never had his own practice. A visit from his sophisticated doctor sister punctuates his exile, as does the companionship of a stray dog Barone. When Mussolini conquers Ethiopia, he releases the political prisoners in a gesture of magnanimity and Levi is sent home, carrying images and memories of the town that "Christ never redeemed". This film can be found in most major video rental stores.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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I Vitelloni (The Layabouts) - 1953
Director: Federico Fellini
Run time: 104 minutes
This classic Italian film sensitively portrays the lives of five young men who are very dissatisfied with life in their small town on the Adriatic Sea. Unfortunately, as the title suggests, they lack the motivation and drive to look for gainful employment, and instead, spend their time engaging in idle - and not always honest - activities. This was one of the early films of Alberto Sordi who went on to become one of the most beloved actors in Italy.
-Recommended by Andrea Meloni

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Il Conformista (The Conformist) - 1970
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Run time: 115 minutes
Bernardo Bertolucci ( 1900, The Last Emperor, Little Buddha, Last Tango in Paris, Stealing Beauty ) adapted Alberto Moravia’s novel to the screen, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcello Clerici, the haunted and reluctant Fascist assassin; Stefania Sandrelli as Giulia, his bourgeois wife whose vapid manners conceal considerable depth and even depravity; Dominique Sanda as Anna Quadri, the capricious wife of Clerici’s dissertation director; Luca Quadri, a leftist intellectual who has retreated to Paris for his safety and to direct his campaign against the Fascists. This fragmented film, brilliantly photographed in modernist tonalities and patternings by Vittorio Storaro, begins in 1938 with Clerici and the thug Manganiello pursuing the Quadris to their death, then flashes back some 10 or 12 times to earlier periods: Clerici at work at the radio station with his blind friend Italo; Clerici with his insane father; Clerici’s mother with their oriental chauffeur supplying her drugs; Clerici as a child molested by their pederast chauffeur Lino whom he shoots in confusion; Clerici courting Giulia meeting her mother and going to confession. On their honeymoon to Paris they make contact as planned with the Quadris, dancing and drinking together and both becoming sexually involved with Anna. Clerici agonizes over his assignment to kill both Quadris and sits helpless as a spectator as the thugs dispatch them. Five years later in 1943 at the fall of Mussolini, Clerici returns to the streets of Rome with Italo, now repudiating Fascism in his lifelong search for normalcy, but discovering Lino in the gutter, still alive, leaving a closing portrait of moral confusion and ambiguity.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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Il Giardino Dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden Of The Finzi-Contini) -1970
Director: Vittorio De Sica
Run time: 94 minutes
DeSica adapts Giorgio Bassani’s novel of the persecution of the Jews in Ferrara from 1938 to 1943, featuring the wealthy Finzi-Contini family, their children Micol (Dominique Sanda) and Alberto, and other family friends including Giorgio and his brother Ernesto. The persecution of the Jews is slow but certain: first they are evicted from the tennis club and retreat to the Finzi-Continis’ private court in their Eden-like garden. Then Giorgio is told that he can no longer go to the university; he is thrown out of the public library and must resort to the private library of the Finzi-Contini family. Alberto’s fatal illness, his decline, death, and funeral represent that of all his people. While in France, Giorgio’s brother Ernesto meets people who have been in the fabled death camps (Dachau); the nightmare is real indeed, and at the end the two families are rounded up at Micol's old elementary school and sent off separated to their fates. Giorgio, of course, escaped to write the novel The film ends with a Jewish lament sung as the camera pans across the city, emphasizing the number of victims, a memorial tribute to all those who suffered and were lost. This popular film is easily found in video stores throughout the United States.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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Io Non Ho Paura (I’m Not Afraid) - 2004
Director: Gabriele Salvatores
Run time: 108 minutes
This beautiful film is based on the novel of the same name by Niccoló Ammaniti. It is the story of Michele, a ten-year-old boy who lives in a village in southern Italy and who makes a surprising discovery. While playing in the fields one day, he discovers a hole that leads to an underground cave. In this cave he finds a boy his own age in chains. This little prisoner is hungry, dirty, and losing his mind. Michele begins to bring him food and tries to comfort him. He soon discovers that this boy has been kidnapped and that one of the kidnappers is Michele’s own father. The lives of both children are in danger. Michele matures quickly as he must make some crucial decisions. The ending of the film is dramatic.
- Recommended by Christine Foster Meloni

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Mediterraneo (Mediterranean) - 1991
Director: Gabriele Salvatores
Run time: 96 minutes
This film is a charming escapist tale of a small reconnaissance team of Fascist soldiers sent ashore during World War II to stay for four months on Mighisti in the Greek islands, which were occupied, by the Germans and Italians. While ashore, their ship is sunk by the English, and they are marooned for three years, like Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey. The characters are very distinctive: the poetic lieutenant Raffaele Montini (Claudio Bigagli) who paints, the rough sergeant Nicola LoRusso (Diego Abatantuono) and his adoring buddy Luciano Colasanti (Ugo Conti), the shy Antonio Farina (Giuseppe Cederna), the beautiful prostitute Vassilissa (Vanna Barba), the peasant brothers Libero and Felice Munaron (Memo Dini and Vasco Mirandola) who find happiness with a shepherdess (Irene Grazioli), the lonely husband Corrado Noventa (Claudio Bisio) desperate to return home, the lowly peasant Eliseo Strazzabosco (Gigio Alberti) and his beloved donkey Silvana, the orthodox local priest, and Aziz, the Turkish smuggler. The soldiers make fools of themselves generally, revealing their humanity and their vulnerability at every occasion, but they also build lasting beauty in their relationships and find something they never knew existed.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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Roma Citta Aperta (Open City)- 1945
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Run time: 100 minutes
This film stars Aldo Fabrizio and Anna Magnani, along with many unknown nonprofessional actors, in a story where the partigiani or communist resistance fighters are battling the last of the Hitler’s German Nazi forces in Rome at the end of World War II, 1944. Giorgio Manfredi (alias Luigi Ferrari and later Giovanni Episcopo) is fleeing certain torture and death, helped by Don Pietro, a leftist sympathizing priest, and Francesco, an underground printer, who is engaged to the widowed Pina, who is pregnant to him, and has a son, Marcello, from a previous marriage. Marcello and his friend Romoletto have formed a gang of child terrorists who blow up a Nazi fuel truck. When the Nazis search their apartment building and take away Francesco, Pina runs after them and is shot down in the street. Her sister Laura and fellow actress Marina, Giorgio’s sometime lover, betray his whereabouts to Ingrid and Bergmann. Giorgio and Don Pietro are caught, along with an Austrian deserter, and killed, while Francesco escapes, thanks to Marcello’s gift of his mother’s scarf.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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Umberto D - 1951
Director: Vittorio De Sico
Run time: 91 minutes
DeSica and Cesare Zavattini wrote this original filmscript set in Rome and dedicated to DeSica’s father. Umberto Domenico Ferrari, a lonely, bankrupt pensioner whose best friend is his dog Flag, fights for his dignity and health as his nouveau riche landlady and her upstart fiancé attempt to evict him from his room of twenty years in her apartment. Unable to earn money or to beg, Umberto sells his watch and books in a failed attempt to raise the rent money he owes. When Umberto goes to the hospital for tonsillitis, his dog Flag disappears, and he is lucky to find him at the pound just before his execution. Unable to care for his pet, yet unwilling to abandon Flag at a kennel, Umberto tries to end both their lives.
- Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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Malena - 2000
Run time: 92 minutes
This film was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore of Cinema Paradiso fame. It is set in 1940 in the beautiful but fictional town of Castelcuta, Sicily. The town is turned upside down when lovely Malena Scordia (Monica Bellucci) arrives to live with her father while her husband is away at war. She is admired by all of the men and hated by all of the women. 13-year-old Renato Amoroso falls hopelessly in love with her. After her husband is killed in battle, the men consider her fair game and her reputation rapidly deteriorates. Renato becomes disillusioned as, in his mind, his ideal woman turns into a prostitute. As an adult he looks back and puts his infatuation and pain into perspective. The setting is beautifully photographed and the music by composer Ennio Morricone is very powerful.
-Recommended by Christine Meloni

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Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzuro mare d'agosto (Swept Away) - 1974
Director: Lina Wertmuller
Run time: 116 mins
This satiric and lyric film, starring Giancarlo Giannini as the southern leftist sailor Gennarino Carrunchio and Mariangela Melato as the rich northern industrialist's loudmouth wife Raffaella, has never stopped generating controversy. The idyllic setting of a Mediterranean cruise is immediately contaminated by polemic, arguing between the guests on political issues, even as they swim and lounge on board. Raffaella criticizes everything and wounds the pride of the crewmembers, especially Gennarino. When they are stranded in the Zodiac (symbol of destiny), their standoff turns to fierce animosity. Once ashore on a deserted island, Gennarino begins to affirm his revolt and dominate Raffaella, who is now helpless. Feminists railed at the extended rape sequence, where Raffaella is a symbolic target responsible for a catalogue of social injustices inflicted on the poor by her class. But her submission turns to love and reciprocal passion. The idyll is broken when they are rescued and the forces of society separate them once again.
-Recommended by Rebecca Pauly

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IT. Il fuoco su di me - 2006
Director: Lamberto Lambertini
Il fuoco di cui si parla nel titolo non è altro che il calore dell’amore. Pur essendo un film con radici storiche, il breve regno del francese Joachim Murat a Napoli, il film si impernia su tre storie d’amore. Una è quella di Murat per Napoli ed il popolo napoletano; un’altra l’amore di Murat per sua moglie (la sorella più giovane di Napoleone); e in fine l’amore di Eugenio, un giovane tenente francese, che per altro non amava la vita militare, per una bellissima giovane donna napoletana. Il fuoco di cui si parla nel titolo e’ anche il fuoco del protone di esecuzione. Questo film finisce in tragedia.
- Suggerito da Andrea Meloni

EN.Fire at my Heart - 2006
The fire mentioned in the title is the heat of love. Although the film has its roots in history, the brief reign of the French Joachim Murat in Naples, it focuses on three love stories. One is the love of Murat for Naples and the Neapolitan people; another is the love of Murat for his wife (the younger sister of Napoleon); and, finally, the love of Eugenio, a young French lieutenant who does not actually like military life, for a beautiful young Neapolitan woman. The fire in the title also refers to a firing squad. This film ends in tragedy.
- Recommended by Andrea Meloni

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IT. Respiro - 2002
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Run time: 95 minutes
Lo dice il titolo stesso. E’ la necessita di ampio respiro per gli abitanti di un’isola (Lampedusa) nel bel mezzo del Mediterraneo tra le coste del Nord Africa e del sud della Sicilia. E’ questa sensazione di isolamento che arriva a far impazzire una persona. Nel film la protagonista, una moglie con tre figli e un marito pescatore, non riesce ad adattarsi alla oppressiva vita insulare e cerca in tanti modi di evadere da questa monotonia fino a fuggire da casa per nascondersi in una grotta, aiutata in questo da uno dei figli. Ma in fine l’amore per il marito e la famiglia prevale.
Il film mette in risalto il contrasto esistente fra il paesaggio brullo, polveroso, e arido senza la minima traccia di vegetazione o alberi dell’isola ed il mare con i suoi colori splendidi che vanno dal verde smeraldo ai vari toni di blu
- Suggerito da Andrea Meloni

EN. Breathing Room (2002)
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Run time: 95 minutes
The title itself says it. It is the need for breathing room for the residents of an island (Lampedusa) right in the middle of the Mediterranean between the coasts of North Africa and southern Sicily. It is this feeling of isolation that drives a person crazy. In the film the protagonist, a woman with three children and a fisherman husband, cannot get used to the oppressive island life and she tries in many ways to escape the monotony to the point of running away from home to hide in a cave, aided in this endeavor by one of her sons. But in the end her love for her husband and her family prevails.
The film emphasizes the contrast that exists between the barren landscape that is dusty and dry with no traces of vegetation or trees and the sea with its splendid colors that go from emerald green to various tonalities of blue.
- Recommended by Andrea Meloni

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