Egisto Macchi

"Il mondo a scatti" is a film that intertwines images of today and yesterday, still images and moving images through a dialogue between two people who reflect on the visible and invisible things of the world: Cecilia Mangini, unstoppable ninety years old, photographer, documentary maker, screenwriter is filmed by Paolo Pisanelli, photographer, director, curator of cultural events.

In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.

In Germany, an old man attacks another old man and is arrested. The attacker refuses to speak. A female lawyer is appointed to him. She discovers that the attacker has numbers tattooed on his arm and the attacked man was a German officer.

When his wife Lydia commits suicide, succesful attorney Robert Havinck is freed from his unhappy marriage. Unfortunately, it turns out she took a complete stranger along with her, and a feeling of guilt and curiosity about her motives lead Havinck to team up with his fifteen-year old daughter to explore Lydia's final days.

A respected police commissioner has a reputation as a opera lover, but by night he also enjoys plunging into the transvestite scene. In addition, he harbors a longing for his very own sister. When he learns that his wife has been murdered, he tries to implicate the set designer who has designs on his sister.

In this erotic drama, Marcel (Ralph Michael) fantasizes about being with his daughter-in-law Simone (Beatie Edney) after the death of his wife. The woman pretends to be surprised over his attention but does nothing to discourage his advances. He promises to build her a swimming pool in order to further his fantasies. The story is taken from the novel by Junichiro Tamizaki.

John the Baptist, the prophet of Israel, is imprisoned by Herod, governor of Judea for protesting Herod's marriage to his brother's wife. Jealousies rage and Herod's step-daughter and niece Salome seduces Herod by means of a torrid dance to give her the head of the prophet - but then tries to save the life of the man she has thus condemned. Updated to a WWII setting

A compelling drama/documentary chronicling the life and death of Il Duce himself, from his days as a terrorist to his alliance with Hitler to the betrayal of his son-in-law and untimely demise.

A fugitive takes refuge in a manor where a blind retired thespian lives.

An aristocratic Sicilian family living in the 1950s. Count Villafratti has sex one night with his nymphomaniac daughter because he thinks she is his wife.

A reporter travelling to Latin America witnesses a murder through the lens of his camera.

Documentary in which 94 year-old Francesca Bertini recalls her life and career while attending a screening of Assunta Spina.

In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents' villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother's depression, and her mother's suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. "Is my life real, or is it theater?" This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.

Barcelona between 1917 and 1923. Is the era of gangsterism, during which gunmen clash between anarchists and thugs paid by The Patronal showed a shocking number of deaths. The confrontation between anarchists and workers of the factory owners Savolta arms worsens when Savolta family decides to end the rebellion hiring murderers hired and plotting to hide their illegal transactions with Germany. Adapted from the novel by Eduardo Mendoza.

During a spaghetti western screening a man is shot dead, the doors are locked and the police is called in to investigate.

Paris, France, 1942, during the Nazi occupation. Robert Klein, a successful art dealer who benefits from the misfortunes of those who are ruthlessly persecuted, discovers by chance that there is another Robert Klein, apparently a Jewish man; someone with whom he could be mistakenly identified, something dangerous in such harsh times.

Paris, France, 1942, during the Nazi occupation. Robert Klein, a successful art dealer who benefits from the misfortunes of those who are ruthlessly persecuted, discovers by chance that there is another Robert Klein, apparently a Jewish man; someone with whom he could be mistakenly identified, something dangerous in such harsh times.

Documentary on the river Ganges.

A "symbolic" character traces the path of man in search of salvation in this world within his own ghosts and deformations.

A war film based on the novel "Journey into the Vertigo" by Evgenija Solomonovna Ginzburg

A war film based on the novel "Journey into the Vertigo" by Evgenija Solomonovna Ginzburg

How the Italian Fascist Party managed to turn the physical elimination of a political enemy into a test of strength fundamental for the ascent into the totalitarian regime.

Vincenzo is hired by mobster Salvatore and moves to Turin with his sister Annunziata. After witnessing a mafia hit, he is sent to France. On his return he discovers that his sister is no longer working but is instead performing as a stripper in a nightclub...

A Stalinist assassin tracks exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky to Mexico in 1940.

Performances by artists in 1968 Rome: Cesare Tacchi, Eliseo Mattiacci, Jannis Kounellis, Aldo Mondino and Nanni Cagnone redefine the boundaries of contemporary art by playing with heterogeneous materials, aluminum wheels, fish, kites, paper planes. The group from via Brunetti performs in piazza del Popolo, reviving the city traffic with by now bizarre means of transport, the velocipede and the tractor, on which, with an Indian scalp on his head, Gino De Dominicis whizzes by, immortalized by the camera before the cult of immortality delivered him to the logic of disappearance.

(A)lter (A)ction, 1968. Videotape, black-and-white, sound; 65 minutes (director's edit: 57 minute television version).

In a small town in Lazio every year a procession is held in honor of San Giovanni, to ask forgiveness for the sins committed, recalling an ancient legend.

Renowned gunman Richard Martin is traveling on a train, held up by Billy Kane, a former student of Martin's. Kane spares Martin, but only after shooting his hands. Years later, Martin meets an escaped convict, wrongly convicted for the train robbery. Martin trains his new student and both men seek out Billy Kane.

E.C.H.O., a secret organization with a strange name masterminds a bizarre plot to take over the world by dosing important `nerve centers' with super potent LSD. The only man who can stop them is Rex, a secret agent working for an undisclosed organization.

The Lagno is the canal that crosses Naples, collecting its debris to stop even before reaching the sea. Around its dirty waters, the film outlines a cross-section that is anything but oleographic of the Neapolitan capital, immortalized already in the advanced industrial era and still wearing the signs of war and desperate poverty. After a few spoken notes, the sound commentary is entirely inhabited by a ghostly composition.

Initial panorama of Brindisi, a city with a peasant tradition. The petrochemical, city within a city. Children in poor neighborhoods, workers' voices: the crisis, the layoffs, the need for the recommendations of the Christian Democrats to enter Montecatini. Wealthy men and women binge at the restaurant. Voices of agrarians, forced to leave the earth to make room for the petrochemical. A ballroom. In a puppet theater, a show is staged in which the worker is addressed as "starved". At a course for foremost workers, various compliant testimonies follow one another: Monteshell is a large industry, and no one has any criticisms against it. But another worker, elsewhere, with his face in the shadows, confesses that everyone is afraid to speak, skilled workers get the same pay as simple ones, 400 colleagues have been fired, union activists are "special supervised", and going on strike is a business. 35mm b/w

The industrial city of Brindisi is the setting for this film, the tension between the bright promises of the industrial world and the not-so-bright reality of a young worker, in one of Mangini's most emblematic works.

This documentary is one of the earliest film enquiries on women's condition in Italy, seen in its different aspects: social, economic, psychological. Starting from an analysis of the feminine role models proposed by the cultural industry, the film finds its protagonists among all kinds of women.

In Montesano, Salento, during the festivities held in August in honour of Saint Donatus, patron saint of epileptics and the mentally ill, the power of collective suggestion causes strange phenomena and rituals to occur. Luigi Di Gianni, master of anthropological documentary, films the worshippers with Dionysian force as they writhe and scream as if in a pagan rite, showing how the content of the Catholic liturgy succumbs to the primitive passion of popular religiosity.

Italian costume drama about convicted women in France being sent to the penal colony on Devil's Island where they must wade through alligator-infested waters and find gold. Life on the island is tough for these buxom, beautifully-swept coiffed maidens - virtually none who look like they had even the slightest knowledge of crimes worthy of such a punishment. Here, if the girls want to get a day of rest they must work the night with the guards and/or warden of the island, but some changes come when Guy Madison arrives as the new warden out to change the horrible lives led by these playmate-wannabes.

Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.

It's 1790 and British Naval Commander Redway is driven by greed for money and will stop at nothing to get it. His second in command, David Robinson, questions his allegiance when Redway kills his father and takes his brother prisoner. In order to save his brother and avenge his father's death David must join forces with a band of pirates, led by Captain Bernard, hunt down and kill Redway.

The film begins at night, as parishioners holding lanterns form a series of processions, travelling through the night from Rome, and villages in the Abruzzi and Lazio regions, to make it to the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore, 10 miles from the capital, by morning. More than an anthropological study of ecstatic devotion – with its genuflecting disciples, and women who scream desperately at the sky – Divino Amore also speaks to Mangini’s interest in disappearing rituals and communities at risk of extinction. When generations of worshippers pour out of the church at the end of the service, formality dissolves into secular leisure, as families perched on horse carts eat plates of spaghetti and men fall asleep on the grass. The velvet-clad austerity of the church’s interior gives way to a series of pastoral tableaux.

On a hot summer day, a group of boys of the Roman suburbs play and laugh in one of the many rivers that surround the city. The camera scrutinizes them, approaches them, reveals the gestures and glances, wraps them in a sort of visual dance, while the words of the commentary (entrusted to the poetic sensibility of Pier Paolo Pasolini) narrate the stories, desires, dreams, the future.

A unique documentary on the tra­ditional dirge in Griko, an ancient language of Salento.

A day in the life of Maria, an old woman who lives on a farm in Puglia. She is not afraid of death, the gestures and actions that fill her days give meaning to time.