Turin at the end of the fifties: two brothers have emigrated there from Sicily and the older works very hard to let the younger study and free himself from poverty through culture. The boy ...
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Antonio, a policeman (carabiniere), has an order to take two children (Rosetta and her brother Luciano) from Milan to Sicily to an orphanage. Their mother has been arrested for forcing ... See full summary »
Director:
Gianni Amelio
Stars:
Enrico Lo Verso,
Valentina Scalici,
Giuseppe Ieracitano
Tommaso Scalia is a man who commits three murders: he killed his superior who sacked him, he kills the man who replaced him, and he kills his own wife. He wants a quick trial and an early ... See full summary »
Director:
Gianni Amelio
Stars:
Gian Maria Volontè,
Ennio Fantastichini,
Renato Carpentieri
Two Italian racketeers come to Albania just after the fall of the communists to set up a fictive firm and pocket the grants. They need a stooge. They choose an old one in a jail : Spiro. ... See full summary »
Director:
Gianni Amelio
Stars:
Enrico Lo Verso,
Michele Placido,
Piro Milkani
The first man is an adaptation of the unfinshed autobiographical novel "Le Premier Homme" by the french writer Albert Camus. It tells the story of Jacques Cormery and his childhood in Algeria.
Director:
Gianni Amelio
Stars:
Michel Crémadès,
Jacques Gamblin,
Mickaël Batret
Back from the hospital where he has been treated after a heart attack, Lorenzo is on his way upstairs to his top-floor apartment in Naples when he meets Michela. The charming young woman, ... See full summary »
Labourer Vincenzo travels from Italy to China in search of a machine with a deficiency that was produced in the now defunct establishment at which Vincenzo worked for years.
Director:
Gianni Amelio
Stars:
Sergio Castellitto,
Ling Tai,
Angelo Costabile
The shepherd Gombo lives with his wife, three children and grandmother in a tent on the Mongolian steppe. They are pleased with their rustic conditions, until a Russian truck driver, ... See full summary »
Set in modern day Milan, this is a Chaplinesque odyssey through the world of work - every type of work, but primarily unskilled manual labor, seen through the eyes of a kind, middle-aged ... See full summary »
Director:
Gianni Amelio
Stars:
Antonio Albanese,
Livia Rossi,
Gabriele Rendina
On location in Portugal, a film crew runs out of film while making their own version of Roger Corman's Day the World Ended (1955). The producer is nowhere to be found and director Friedrich... See full summary »
Director:
Wim Wenders
Stars:
Allen Garfield,
Samuel Fuller,
Isabelle Weingarten
Turin at the end of the fifties: two brothers have emigrated there from Sicily and the older works very hard to let the younger study and free himself from poverty through culture. The boy however is not keen on school and would like to begin to work. When after some time he gets his degree however things take a violent and dramatic turn......Written by
Salvatore santangelo <pappagone2@libero.it>
Despite winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, Gianni Amelio still had to wait over three years before he saw his film released in the US. See more »
Quotes
Giovanni:
You think your children are your own, then they learn to walk and they leave you. Know what they say back home? "Raise hogs, 'cause then you can eat them"
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"mezza sola" means half a shoe sole in italian. It is an expression used to describe something that didn't quite satisfy. After all the oop-la, the expectations for this motion picture were high. But at the end, our "stomachs" were left empty. Production-wise, it was poor: most of the shots are indoors, with very few outdoor shots. In the entire movie length, only one vehicle is seen. The movie is billed as the emigrant experience of a southern italian to the industrialized city of Turin in the late '50s. It is actually a family drama of the relationship of two brothers. It used the Turin emigrant story as background, and yet the city was hardly seen. If the movie was billed as the story of two brothers in China's Shangai, one could hardly find a problem with it (I say this to emphasize how much the "indoor" shots were dense). Also, each single take seemed to be three seconds too loooong. It is as if the director is in love with the story, he is financing the movie with his own money, and thus he feels justified to make his story told on his long, boring way. The style of the cinematography and costumes is a Spielberg-like focus on a few pivotal items such as rope being used to tie shut-closed the overbulging suitcases, the rawness of clothing, and the thick sician accented dialogues. But, like Spielberg's, this picture was noticeable in that it was a historical drama *intentionally* retouched awash in a sepia-backgrounded memory. To me, it trivialized the story. A more sucessfull aproach is Lina Wertmuller's, that, while certain traits are over emphasized, but justified if the film is not a drama but a comedy, in which the focus is not the manieristic style itself but the story, this in a mannieristic background.
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"mezza sola" means half a shoe sole in italian. It is an expression used to describe something that didn't quite satisfy. After all the oop-la, the expectations for this motion picture were high. But at the end, our "stomachs" were left empty. Production-wise, it was poor: most of the shots are indoors, with very few outdoor shots. In the entire movie length, only one vehicle is seen. The movie is billed as the emigrant experience of a southern italian to the industrialized city of Turin in the late '50s. It is actually a family drama of the relationship of two brothers. It used the Turin emigrant story as background, and yet the city was hardly seen. If the movie was billed as the story of two brothers in China's Shangai, one could hardly find a problem with it (I say this to emphasize how much the "indoor" shots were dense). Also, each single take seemed to be three seconds too loooong. It is as if the director is in love with the story, he is financing the movie with his own money, and thus he feels justified to make his story told on his long, boring way. The style of the cinematography and costumes is a Spielberg-like focus on a few pivotal items such as rope being used to tie shut-closed the overbulging suitcases, the rawness of clothing, and the thick sician accented dialogues. But, like Spielberg's, this picture was noticeable in that it was a historical drama *intentionally* retouched awash in a sepia-backgrounded memory. To me, it trivialized the story. A more sucessfull aproach is Lina Wertmuller's, that, while certain traits are over emphasized, but justified if the film is not a drama but a comedy, in which the focus is not the manieristic style itself but the story, this in a mannieristic background.