The Hummingbird

Opening Night Film | Q&A with Francesca Archibugi on June 1

Adapted from Sandro Veronesi’s Strega Prize-winning novel, Francesca Archibugi’s latest feature is an at once epic and intimate chronicle of love and familial ups and downs that spans six decades and three generations. Featuring Pierfrancesco Favino, Bérénice Bejo, Laura Morante, Nanni Moretti, and others.

Chiara

Q&A with Margherita Mazzucco on June 2

The life of Saint Clare of Assisi—a follower of Saint Francis, himself memorably depicted in films by Rossellini, Pasolini, Liliana Cavani and Michael Curtiz—is inventively rendered in this historical kind-of musical by Susanna Nicchiarelli.

Delta

Q&A with Michele Vannucci on June 4

Something like a backwater noir cum western, Michele Vannucci’s second feature is set on the Po Delta in northern Italy, where tensions are rising among the small community that calls it home, especially between a lifelong native fisherman (Alessandro Borghi) and a wildlife warden (Luigi Lo Cascio).

Dry

Q&A with Tommaso Ragno on June 2

A historic three-year drought serves as the point of departure for the latest by Paolo Virzì, a wryly satirical ensemble drama (with a top-notch cast including Silvio Orlando, Valerio Mastandrea, Monica Bellucci, Tomasso Ragno, and others) about the vanity of humans in the face of global catastrophe.

Fireworks

Q&A with Giuseppe Fiorello, Gabriele Pizzurro, and Samuele Segreto on June 1

Based on a true story and set in Sicily in 1982, Giuseppe Fiorello’s debut feature chronicling a budding romance between two teenage boys is a moving examination of the painful moments that produce political change.

Like Turtles

Q&A with Monica Dugo

Actress Monica Dugo makes her directorial feature debut in this tragicomic chronicle of a family’s dissolution about a woman who, her husband having abruptly left her and their children behind, climbs into her wardrobe and refuses to come out.

Lord of the Ants

The latest from the great Gianni Amelio is a masterfully executed and deeply stirring biopic of the poet/playwright Aldo Braibanti (Luigi Lo Cascio), who was jailed in 1968 under a Fascist-era anti-homosexuality law.

Margins

Q&A with Niccolò Falsetti

A punk band finds itself in a sticky situation when they invite a prominent American hardcore band to perform in Grosseto in Niccolò Falsetti’s charming and funny debut feature.

My Summer with the Shark

Q&A with Davide Gentile

Davide Gentile’s debut feature, about a 13-year-old boy mourning his father who becomes transfixed by an abandoned villa on the Roman coast, is a surprising and original coming-of-age story in which the mysteries of youth and the oneiric power of cinema intermingle.

Princess

The lives of migrant sex workers receive an eminently surprising, by turns comic and dead-serious treatment in Roberto De Paolis’s sophomore feature, about a charismatic 19-year-old who hustles in a forest on the outskirts of Rome.

Strangeness

Roberto Andò’s 12th feature stars Toni Servillo as Nobel Prize-winning playwright Luigi Pirandello, who, on a trip to his native Sicily in 1920, encounters a pair of gravediggers/aspiring actors and unexpectedly arrives at the idea for what will ultimately become his signature work.

Leopardi

Mario Martone again returned to the 19th century in this sensitive, exquisitely shot portrait of the cherished Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (a brilliant Elio Germano).

Nostalgia

Q&A with Tommaso Ragno

The latest fiction feature from Mario Martone is a richly traced, Naples-set drama about a man’s (Pierfrancesco Favino) return to the city in which he grew up and the skeletons in the closet that he rediscovers upon arrival.

Troubling Love

Among Mario Martone’s signature films is this 1995 thriller, co-written with and adapted from a novel by Elena Ferante, about a Neapolitan artist’s investigation into her mother’s mysterious suicide.