Tarek Ben Abdallah

A journey through Italy across a century of popular religious devotion. Ancient and more recent saints, white and black Madonnas, devotional processions... are the expression of a need for the sacred that seems very distant from our way of being, but perhaps is not that distant at all. Today, especially in the South, but with some “isolated” locations in the North, popular faith is still a very real thing, which finds its finest expression in song and in music.

Three stories to narrate the relationship between mount Vesuvius and the humanity living at its feet. Maria and her flower garden, Matteo, an artist who paints using the volcano's ashes, and Yole, a neo-melodic singer whose devotion to the Virgin Mary is almost idolatric.

Arriving on a deserted beach in the Mediterranean sea, in a time and a place unspecified, Kaspar Hauser is forced to confront the evil of a Grand Duchess who feels threatened by the power she exercises over the community.

Freak and Jajà, like Vladimir and Estragon, are in a no man’s land, with no date or time. Earth is no longer inhabited by humans but a few strange survivors who appear from time to time. The two protagonists, strangers to each other, meet at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere.

Anna and Mara return from a holiday abroad, and realize that Anis, a young Moroccan immigrant, managed to hide in their car in order to cross the border to Italy. At first unsure of what to do, they then decide to take him with them.

A Donatello award nominated documentary looking at the last centenary of the CGIL - the largest trade union in Italy.

A Donatello award nominated short feature about the difficulties faced by a wheelchair bound journalist who is trying to conduct an interview at the top of an historic Roman building.

THEY KILLED THE SONG! Thirty-year-old Imane lives with her husband and three children in a modest house across from the historic citadel of Aleppo. She suddenly realizes that it's been ten years that she's been married, ten years during which she's done basically nothing more than take care of her husband and their three children.

Six youngsters aged between 20 and 30 years old, stranded within the restricted values of a provincial city, constrained to live in an emotional void, lacking dreams and acknowledged values, brought together by their rage and feeling that they have nothing left to lose. Luca finds happiness with his ex-girlfriend's outgoing brother Riccardo. When a gay-bashing leaves Riccardo dead, Luca lures the perps to an abandoned factory basement, where he pretends to join in on their sadistic torture of a passerby before he turns the tables.

The characters include a dirty-dealing 80-year-old mayor with a troubling Fascist past and a bloodthirsty middle-aged writer - also an ex-Fascist, who has now turned Marxist-Leninist and is ready to settle his accounts with history. There is a young leftist idealist, a city councilperson who is fighting real estate speculation. This is the portrait of Latina and its inhabitants. This province is certainly an anomaly, but is not so far from the present-day times that all of Italy is going through now.

A 52-minute documentary profile of Giuseppe Tornatore featuring interviews with director and extracts from his early home movies as well as interviews with director Francesco Rosi and painter Peppino Ducato, set to music by the legendary Ennio Morricone.