Carlo Di Palma

An account of the life and work of the legendary cinematographer and director Carlo Di Palma (1925-2004) and an emotional journey into the greatest moments of cinema, from the Italian neorealism to the masterpieces of Woody Allen, commented by prestigious figures of world cinema.

Timeless traditions and contemporary anxieties clash musically and theatrically in Leonard Bernstein's powerful but rather neglected "Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers," The dancers are omitted in this semi-staged performance, produced for the Vatican's Jubilee 2000 celebration, but the show's eclectic musical brilliance, its adept mingling and clash of musical styles, its contrasts of hope and anxiety, faith and unbelief, ancient serenity and modern dissatisfaction are all brilliantly conveyed. More than 30 years after its premiere, for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Mass still has the impact of this morning's newspaper headlines.

This film tells the story of a successful writer called Harry Block, played by Allen himself, who draws inspiration from people he knows in real-life, and from events that happened to him, sometimes causing these people to become alienated from him as a result.

A New York girl sets her father up with a beautiful woman in a shaky marriage while her half sister gets engaged.

When Lenny and his wife, Amanda, adopt a baby, Lenny realizes that his son is a genius and becomes obsessed with finding the boy's biological mother in hopes that she will be brilliant too. But when he learns that Max's mother is Linda Ash, a kindhearted prostitute and porn star, Lenny is determined to reform her immoral lifestyle. A Greek chorus chimes in to relate the plot to Greek mythology in this quirky comedy.

A documentary portrait of Michangelo Antonioni based on Roland Barthes' essay.

Somewhere behind the early 1960s cold-war iron curtain, the Hollander family cause an international spying incident when Walter photographs a sunset in a sensitive region. In order to stay out of jail, the Hollanders take refuge in the American Embassy, which is temporarily being run by the absent Ambassador's diplomatically incompetent son, Axel.

A vicious serial sex killer is on the loose, and landscape gardener and shop-window outfitter Loris is the prime suspect, thanks to his unfortunate habit of getting caught in compromising situations (for which there is always a totally innocent explanation that the police fail to spot). Undercover policewoman Jessica is assigned by eccentric police psychologist Taccone to follow Loris and ...

After young playwright, David Shayne obtains funding for his play from gangster Nick Valenti, Nick's girlfriend Olive miraculously lands the role of a psychiatrist—but not only is she a bimbo who could never pass for a psychiatrist—she's a dreadful actress. David puts up with the leading man who is a compulsive eater, the grand dame who wants her part jazzed up, and Olive's interfering hitman/bodyguard—but, eventually he must decide whether art or life is more important.

A middle-aged couple suspects foul play when their neighbor's wife suddenly drops dead.

When Jack and Sally announce that they're splitting up, this comes as a shock to their best friends Gabe and Judy. Maybe mostly because they also are drifting apart and are now being made aware of it. So while Jack and Sally try to go on and meet new people, the marriage of Gabe and Judy gets more and more strained, and they begin to find themselves being attracted to other people.

With a serial strangler on the loose, a bookkeeper wanders around town searching for the vigilante group intent on catching the killer.

Alice Tate, mother of two, with a marriage of 16 years, finds herself falling for the handsome sax player, Joe. Stricken with a backache, she consults herbalist Dr. Yang, who realizes that her problems are not related to her back, but in her mind and heart. Dr. Yang's magical herbs give Alice wondrous powers, taking her out of well-established rut.

Promotional omnibus film, made for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, featuring portraits of 12 Italian cities.

Documentary about India's most important Hindu festival, 1977's Kumbha Mela, during which millions of believers gather to pray where the Ganges, Jamuna and Saraswati rivers meet.

After a suicide attempt, Lane has moved into her country house to recuperate. Her best friend, Stephanie, has come to join her for the summer. Lane's mother, Diane, has recently arrived with her husband Lloyd, Lane's stepfather. Lane is close to two neighbors: Peter, and Howard. Howard is in love with Lane, Lane is in love with Peter, and Peter is in love with Stephanie.

Brantley Foster, a well-educated kid from Kansas, has always dreamed of making it big in New York, but once in New York, he learns that jobs - and girls - are hard to get. When Brantley visits his uncle, Howard Prescott, who runs a multi-million-dollar company, he is given a job in the company's mail room.

The Narrator tells us how the radio influenced his childhood in the days before TV. In the New York City of the late 1930s to the New Year's Eve 1944, this coming-of-age tale mixes the narrator's experiences with contemporary anecdotes and urban legends of the radio stars.

Joe Gower's job is skating through library shelves, fetching books. A police officer/friend of his is chosen to participate in a charity dance performance. Gower agrees to take his place in the show by posing as a police officer. He falls for a female officer in the show and gets into various scrapes with fellow cops and also crooks. And he dances.

Between two Thanksgivings, Hannah's husband falls in love with her sister Lee, while her hypochondriac ex-husband rekindles his relationship with her sister Holly.

A film of Enrico Berlinguer's funeral in Rome, briefly tracing his career as leader of the Italian Communist Party.

Twenty-three years after L'Avventura (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni returns to Lisca Bianca Island. The rarefied atmosphere of Anna's (Lea Massari's) disappearance is recalled by some audio excerpts from the original movie.

In 1925, Gabriela, a poor, uneducated, yet charming woman becomes cook, mistress, and then wife of Nacib, a bar owner in Ilhéus, a small Brazilian coastal town run by the local colonels.

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 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.

The son of the owner of a large Italian cheese factory is kidnapped, but as the factory is on the verge of bankruptcy the owner hatches a plan to use the ransom money as reinvestment in the factory.

Louise has left her husband, launched a career as a dress designer, and together with her son, Roby, moved in with John, a lawyer. Despite this emancipated exterior, she still encounters the same problems - a son who demands her attention, a dominating lover, and jealousy.

Mimi Bluette, daughter of a prostitute, lives in Paris where she is idolized by men of all kinds and class, is about to settle with a rich man when, in a bar, she meets a stranger.

Two racy women decide to chuck their mundane lives and go on a wild adventure.

Two racy women decide to chuck their mundane lives and go on a wild adventure.

Teresa gets her first taste of crime -- and its consequences -- when, during World War II, she is nabbed for robbing an apartment. But being poor and perpetually starving, the pretty petty thief doesn't give up her quest for ill-gotten gains and soon turns to pick-pocketing. Despite her questionable thieving skills, the bumbling crook tries scheme after scheme, pilfering from strangers and dodging the law as she searches for a way to fund an adequate meal.

Giorgia, an unhappy housewife tired of marriage with her husband Amedeo, starts to hear a voice that orders her to perform actions out of the ordinary.

The film consists of twelve episodes, all with Monica Vitti as the protagonist.

Comedy about a man who is sentenced to life imprisonment mainly because of a woman's testimony, but she later marries him during his sentence

Barbara (Monica Vitti) is a journalist investigating the local counterculture who becomes involved, after an unpleasant start of battery and stalking, with Pierre Clémenti's louche all-around dropout.

Three episodes. Episode 1 - The Refrigerator (Monicelli). A married couple of two poor emigrant workers spend almost all their money to buy a refrigerator (a must in the '70s). The purchase is too expensive for their family balance sheet. To earn some money they decide to go for prostitution. The wife is not so unhappy to the perspective. Episode 2 - The Room (Sordi). To celebrate ten years of marriage a couple decides to spend a quick holiday in top luxury hotels in Sardinia. But the fashion luxury VIP world is too hard to enter; they soon will end in prison. Episode 3 - The Lion (De Sica). Two adulterous, Antonio and Giulia, are blocked by a lion, staying on the exit in the place they met. They both have to come back home, but couldn't move because of the lion’s presence. The critical situation soon drives them to their limit, revealing their real essence.

Comedy set at the time of King Umberto I of Monza (Italy) about Maria Sarti, aka Ninì Tirabusciò, actress/singer who caused a scandal with her raunchy dancing.

Construction worker Oreste and young fiancee Adelaide meet Nello, cook in a pizzeria. This love triangle often go to communist rallies, and enjoy the filthy beach of Ostia. Will the hostile environment leave a way to jealousy?

Giovanni and Raffaella are happily married from ten years, but their relationship goes into crisis when Raffaella falls in love with Valerio Mantovani, a handsome forty-year-old man she knew during the concerts of chamber music she weekly attends with her mother.

The lawyer Federico Fendi has reasons to believe that his wife Carla in secret is Rome's highest paid prostitute.

Comedy about a self-made woman in Paris contemplating the idea of suicide at first, then murder.

A Sicilian woman is dishonored by her lover, then goes to London with a pistol intending to murder him.

A chastity belt provides an endless amount of grief for a woman whose jealous husband has gone off to the Crusades.

Pietro is a young bourgeois lawyer who married Giuliana, a pretty girl who was a little unscrewed, and met at a party of artists. Despite the premises, everything between the two seems to work best.

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 unknowingly captures a death on film.

Four unrelated short comedies by four different directors. "Queen Sabina"chronicles the sexual misadventures of a teenage girl on the road home. "Queen Armenia" centers on a self-serving opportunistic gypsy babysitter who uses her employer's kids for her own gain. The third episode, "Queen Elena" centers on a husband who learns a lesson about the perils of infidelity after he succumbs to the wiles of the seductive wife next door. The last vignette, "Queen Marta" centers on a wealthy woman who, when drunk, uses her butler as an outlet for her lust.

A group of rogues steal a scroll granting its bearer the property of the land of Aurocastro in Apulia, a province in the south of Italy. They elect a shaggy knight, Brancaleone from Norcia, as their leader, and decide to get possession of this supposedly wealthy land. Many adventures will occurr during the journey.

An attorney arrives at a castle to settle the estate of its recently deceased owner. The owner's wife and daughter reveal that he was someone who was able to summon the souls of ancient plague victims and, in fact, his spirit was roaming the castle at that very moment. Soon occupants of the castle begin to die off in gruesome, violent ways.

Italian comedy film made of three segments directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Mauro Bolognini and Franco Indovina. First segment: Il Provino; second segment: Gli amanti celebri; third segment: Latin Lover.

Pseudo-documentary about the effort to become a movie star by Soraya, the Queen of Iran. It is the first segment of "I tre volti", a collaborative film by Michelangelo Antonioni, Mauro Bolognini, and Franco Indovina.

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.

In this sex-charged character study, a woman's husband persuades her to share in his predilection for group sex. Later, she meets a student and has a one-day affair with him.

Young Italian writers and directors express themselves in four episodes about sex and love. "Love and Language," the first tale, centers on the difficulties of a Sicilian immigrant who is unable to master proper Italian. the second tale "Love and Life" centers on a jealous and unhappy wife who becomes so desperate to be free of her constantly philandering husband she takes on a lover of her own. "Love and Art" a nearly exhausted screenwriter hires a secretary to help manage his typing. She's a pretty lass and this makes his insecure wife crazy until he fires the female and hires a male secretary. "Love and Death," the final episode centers on the love affair between a middle-aged widower and the grieving young widow he meets at the cemetery. Unfortuantely for his bank statement, the young, impoverished beauty isn't as bereaved as she seems.

In late 19th century Sicily, handsome free-spirit Liolà wanders into town, where he encounters an old flame now married to a wealthy landowner.

An alien takes over the body of a factory worker in order to learn about Earth so his race can take it over.

"Les quatre vérités" aka "The Four Truths" is a movie anthology that consists of four segments, all loosely parodying fables from the 17th-century French poet Jean de la Fontaine. The US cut usually features only 3 segments.

Parigi O Cara is probably the most camp in the history of Italian cinema, certainly a favourite with the GLBT community who quote its lines by heart. Unique as it's the only film where Franca Valeri (now 90) is the unquestioned star, in the role of Delia, a snobbish, stingy prostitute who is moving to Paris looking for greener and more lucrative pastures. An anti-neorealist, amoral, almost abstract comedy, which anticipates Almodóvar, a ferocious, though gentle, non-moralistic portrayal of the 60's boom and its broken dreams. The dialogue between Delia and her brother (played by Fiorenzo Fiorentini), when he does (or does not) tell her he is a homosexual, is memorable, a primordial coming-out, a masterpiece of allusions. But what makes it one of the first examples of a film with a "gay point of view" is the approach: perceptive, non-conformist, caustically witty. A film ahead of its times, still unbeaten.

The endless summer of a group of thirty-something neapolitans at Positano.

Ferdinando Cefalù is desperate to marry his cousin, Angela, but he is married to Rosalia and divorce is illegal in Italy. To get around the law, he tries to trick his wife into having an affair so he can catch her and murder her, as he knows he would be given a light sentence for killing an adulterous woman. He persuades a painter to lure his wife into an affair, but Rosalia proves to be more faithful than he expected.

Young man Marco Laudato, after the '8/9/1943's WW2 armistice, enlists in the Italian Social Republic army, attending the last days of the old regime in decay.

Suave antiques dealer Alfredo Martelli is picked up by the police with no justification. At the precinct, Martelli realizes what the investigation is all about-- that he is the main suspect in the killing of his wealthy ex-lover. Is he guilty, or is he just a sleaze?

Determined to survive at any price, Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to an extermination camp, manages to survive by accepting the role of kapo, a privileged prisoner whose mission is to ruthlessly guard other prisoners.

1943. The affair between Anna, unhappily married to wheelchair-bound Pino, and deserter Franco unfolds in foggy Ferrara, intertwining with the power struggle taking place within local Fascist ranks that culminates in a massacre of civilians, including Franco's father – Pino sees it all from his window, but will he tell anyone?

Nando is dissatisfied with his repetitive and mortifying work. He manages to escape from daily mediocrity only at night, when he enters his fantasy world.

An American military aircraft with some female soldiers crash lands in an Italian air base to the delight of the Italian soldiers.

A young French girl, Yvonne, having won a competition, goes to Capri for a short break. There she meets Baron Vanvutelli, an old-fashioned old man, Mario, a Roman student, who came to spend the Sunday at Capri, along with two friends, Renato and Julius.

The young Claudia wants to escape from the gray life of the province and aims rich men but each time with unhappy results. Only the brother will eventually succeed in shaking her from this purpose.

The young Alberto Ruotolo leave the country cottage to go for the sharpshooter. But the command does not pull good air, three riflemen arrogant and unruly bear much disorder as anger Marshal Nero.

A young man in love with a girl whose father--his employer--does not approve of him, disguises himself as a hunchback to get into the father's good graces.

Mario and Fabrizio are two boxer friends who fall for the same girl and become enemies because of her. As time goes by things get better between the two men but... tragedy looms behind the corner.

Achille Scorzella, a poor, unemployed and hungry devil, having been mistaken for a piano tuner, happens in the home of some new riches.

During the winter of 1944, the partisans stationed in the Ligurian Apennines must go to a factory in Genoa, in order to pick up a delivery of weapons. Meanwhile, there's a strike in the city and the Nazis are trying to suppress it violently. The factory becomes the scene of fighting between the Germans and the partisans but the latter, aided by the workers, will be able to get the better.

Unemployed Antonio is elated when he finally finds work hanging posters around war-torn Rome. However on his first day, his bicycle—essential to his work—gets stolen. His job is doomed unless he can find the thief. With the help of his son, Antonio combs the city, becoming desperate for justice.