In Praise of Love (2020)

Through the diary entries of the film's main protagonist K., we learn about her return from post-revolutionary Russia to her home in Greater Syria, in which, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, individual communities are trying to find a way to autonomy. Thanks to the juxtaposition with the Russian past, presented through shots from Soviet film classics such as Esfir Shub's Spain or Kinoglaz by Dziga Vertov, and the Syrian present, portrayed through various mobile phone footage, the director draws parallels between two incompatible realities and creates a multimedia essay on neo-colonialism and independence.

Vera, a ten-year-old girl who loves astronomy, disappears without a trace while walking with Claudio, her teacher, near the cliff of Punta Crena, in Liguria. Two years later she returns, but instead of being a teenager, she is a woman of about twenty-five years old. She doesn’t remember anything. When images resurface in her memory, Vera realizes that she has lived the life of a man, clinically dead, who woke up at the same moment in which she vanished in nothing.

The events in Naples of a few ‘figli della Madonna’ (Madonna’s sons), young people born between 1945 and 1946 from the relationship between the local women and Afro-American soldiers.

Poppy Field follows the struggle of a young Romanian gendarme, Cristi, who tries to find the balance between two apparently opposing parts of his identity: that of a man working in a macho hierarchical environment and that of a closeted gay person who tries to keep his personal life a secret. While his long-distance French boyfriend, Hadi, is visiting him, Cristi is called in for an intervention at a movie theatre, where an ultra-nationalist, homophobic group has interrupted the screening of a queer film. After one of the protesters threatens to out him, Cristi spirals out of control.