Ida Di Benedetto

Maria Celeste is a widow that lives in a retirement home. She is stingy, unpleasant, solitary and looks down on people. Every Sunday Maria sits alone on the park bench, though she tells everyone that she goes to her son's to cook a lovely meal. But on that Sunday, while dozing on the bench, a young girl places a ten month old baby in her arms and runs away leaving Maria stunned and confused. Finally the girl comes back and they start to know each other. The girl asks Maria to take the baby for a second, crosses the street and a tram hits her. She dies without a reason on a warm summer morning. Maria is alone with the baby. Her Maria Celeste's story begins.

Several actors are members of a amateur soccer team. They followed in their preparations for a particular audition and in their personal life. With about 6 actors this delivers a broad picture of Italian life in which the question what it means to be a man is posed in the challenging circumstances of familily life, sex relationships, sport, cross gender roles and mafia.

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace prize winner, is known in the whole world as the banker of the poor, because he pioneered and tested a funding system in Bangladesh: by lending little sums of money to the less well-off with no interest, and returning it by installments gained with their work, people are able to get free from extreme misery. Thus, what can happen if three boys, just graduated, who live in Naples, try to import this funding system that subverts every economic rule?

The story of an unlikely friendship between two men: Giocondo, a wealthy upper middle class man passionately in love with Nono, a black strip-teaser who has ruined him; and the Snake, a male strip-teaser who has traveled all over the world on cruising boats, a tough guy made tougher after a treachery by one of his friends. They meet in jail, where they are kept for different reasons and a strong, brotherly link is born between them.

Feature film.

The film begins on New Year’s Eve 2001 when Angelica attempts suicide by somewhat theatrically cutting her wrists in the bath. Over the weeks that follow we learn all about the complexities of her life and her three best friends, the quartet of the title.

The people of Jerusalem are suffering under the reign of HEROD, and are hoping to be delivered from the Roman occupiers by the Messiah whose arrival, it is rumored, is to take place very soon. Unlike his nephew JUDAS, who wants to join the zealots (freedom fighters), the 35-year-old widower JOSEPH is not interested in participating in any fighting against the Romans.

Scenes from the lives of 7 hookers. Five are women. One is a man, and one is a transvestite.

In the 15th century, in a poor Italian village, the monks of a modest convent take up an abandoned baby. Unfortunately, for all their efforts, they prove unable to trace his parents. So they set up providing tender loving care to the little boy. Marcellino lives a happy life among the men of God but, as he grows up, he misses his mother more and more.

In a southern villa after the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies live Donna Clotilde and Donna Gesualda. The first is a Bourbon baroness who rejects the new world and the Italian language. The other is the poor relative with duties as a maid. Apart from the village priest, they see no one. Then her nephew Ferdinando arrives at the villa, young, handsome, and squirming.

In North Africa, a father and his illegitimate son are in love with the same woman.

Based on the story of the woman recently brought to trial on charges of moral plagiarism and witchcraft.

Mario (Placido), an Italian American who manages a pizzeria in NYC, is charged with an assassination of a judge in Palermo. He leaves the States, comes back to Sicily and recruit Michele, his younger brother, for some help. Michele is a good guy not involved with the Mafia, that is trying to build his life on honesty and hard-working. Michele needs some money to give freedom to a prostitute he is in love, and Mario promise his help in change of an hands to set up his trap for the judge. Anyway Michele isn't made with the same "pasta" of Mario, he couldn't never be a real Mafioso and this causes many between the two brother and the Mafia. There is only a way for Mario to save his brother. A way that Mafia could like.

Tony is a young Neapolitan musician. He has a lot of problems and a past with drugs, but also with women. He is engaged to Susy, but he betrays her with a university professor, who has an invalid husband, but also with other young aspiring singers, who try in every way to break into the world of music. Among these there is Elena, engaged in various difficulties to organize a concert with the best names of Neapolitan music.

The adolescence of Mozart is chronicled in this Italian biopic. Here, young Wolfgang is seen as a prodigy who aspires to a normal life. He is studying music in Bologna when he falls in love with a local girl and makes friends with a boy his own age. Mozart is so elated that he fails a music exam on purpose so he can stay a little longer. Unfortunately, a priest rigs his test and the young composer is forced to move on.

Dea, gynecologist and scientist, and her colleagues have for the last few months been preparing a campaign against the local pharmaceutical industry. A campaign, which is linked to Dea's published findings concerning harmful side effects of the pill. For years Dea and her husband Rheinhard have been defending opposing sides as to the culpability of the company. Rheinhard, who is also a leading scientist like Dea, is a high-ranking employee of the concern. In the meantime Reinhard and Dea's 2 daughters have grown up. The daughter of the company's boss, Johanna, is Dea's assistant and Reinhard's lover.

Salvatore Di Donato is one of the most feared and respected members of the Mafia in Naples. His wife, Assuntina, is a young theater actress. During a pilgrimage to Madonna of the Arch, Salvatore and Assuntina meet Margaret, a woman proud and beautiful. Salvatore falls in love with her, leaves Assuntina and goes to live with his new love. Margaret, however, is a strong woman, free, resistant to bring controlled by Salvatore, and ultimately he is forced to return home, ridiculed in the eyes of all.

Two back-to-back stories that deals with two "taboo" themes, the celibacy of the clergy in the episode of Renato Pozzetto and the homosexuality in the one with Nino Manfredi.

In Rome a man needing money become a transvestite prostitute.

Italian movie

A woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

A couple of young movie makers have secretly filmed for over a year what was going on in a hotel room, trying to realize a "live act" of common people living their life. They get in touch with old and money-tight producer Mengaroni to edit their movie, but while they contact the accidental actors for gathering authorization, he starts to manipulate their work.

Fontamara is a village in the Marsica, forgotten by all but God and its inhabitants are called 'cafoni' (boors). Berardo Viola wants to marry Elvira but only after gaining enough money to buy some land and in order to reach his aim he has the idea of going to a great city. When Maria Grazia is raped by the fascists, Berardo and Antonio decide to leave Fontamara and go to Rome. Here they are swindled by a lawyer and afterwards they are invited by an antifascist to a restaurant where they are arrested by the police because of some subversive papers they had.

A love story between two women in the Naples outskirts, a universe so far away from the glare of modernity, turbid, rural, completely naked in its ugliness and sorrow, where "people are talking".

An impoverished young man from Sicily travels to Wolfsburg, West Germany to find work. He takes a job in the Volkswagen factory after he travels through Northern Italy by train.

Cahiers du cinéma critic Serge Daney asks whether The Kingdom of Naples is "leftist fiction, kitschy melodrama, photo-roman, a decadent chronicle of a city, opera in a minor key, or simply the first realistic narrative film by Schroeter?" It is all of these and more: an epic chronicle of proletarian family life in Naples from 1943 to 1972 that brilliantly captures the wretched poverty, overwrought passions, and political, religious and economic upheavals of Sicily across two generations. Schroeter assimilates neorealist aesthetics and class sympathies with the tempestuous excesses of popular melodrama, borrowing freely from Rossellini, Pasolini, Visconti, Brecht, and Rossini. (Facets)

Story about a young girl, the daughter a prominent doctor. When the girl goes missing her father gets the police to jump into action because of his class status and wealth.