Rossella Or

Former theatre actress comes back to Rome and meets old and new friends.

"Regina Coeli" is the nickname with which inmates call Regina, voluntary assistant in Rome's Rebibbia jail, very involved in solidarity but lonely in his private life. The jail director entrusts her with the task to try re-educating Graziano, a young Sardinian sentenced for a kidnapping of which he always proclaimed himself to be innocent. Regina is way too much mature and lonely not to feel intrigued by the mysterious personality of the illiterate shepherd, who expresses himself only in his almost unintelligible Sardinian dialect.

The story is about a youth named Massimo Monaldi, who, living in Rome, is a part-time college student who has some involvement in the protests that occur at his university. Massimo is also involved with drugs and he sometimes steals to make a living and support his habit (the theft of a tobacco box is very important to the story). Among his associates are his girlfriend, Cinzia, who comes from a wealthy family, and he has a wealthy male friend named Rudy who is very naive as well as strangely pampered by his overly-doting mother. Both families don't approve of their relationship with Massimo.

Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).

A local sheriff is unjustly accused of murder in a small town and forced to flee. He gets rid of his enemies one by one and tries to prove his innocence.