Ventura Film

Women in a failing silk factory, fight to find a way to keep their jobs.

The world of fashion, between the end of the Sixties and the beginning of the Noughties, had a key character that embodied its spirit and told the tale: journalist Anna Piaggi, living witness of that contamination between art, society and culture that changed fashion and sanctioned its success on a global scale. The daughter of a manager for La Rinascente (Milan's iconic high-end shopping mall whose foundation goes back to 1865), Karl Lagerfeld's muse, "a poet with her clothes" in the words of Bill Cunningham, her life is retraced through interviews with designers (Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Stephen Jones, Manolo Blahnik, and more) together with archival images from four decades of fashion history.

The film looks again at recent events from a female point of view, through the first-hand accounts provided by the diaries of three women. Rather than focusing on the alleged objectivity of facts, the film gives space to a chorus of voices that narrate those events in first person, visually supported by archival footage of the period, drawn from the most varied sources - institutional, public, militant and private. Anita, Teresa and Valentina come from different Italian regions and different social backgrounds, but share the same feelings: they no longer feel as part of a society based on the patriarchal family, on the power of "husbands" and on the supremacy of males, which requires them to be efficient mothers, obedient wives and virtuous daughters.

Forty year-old Bruno Ledeux, seen sitting across from the doctor, gives the impression of a man who is no longer young but not yet old.Condemned to remain nothing more than a son, he begins his downward slide, as if a fog had shut him in a cage from which there is no escape. Bruno can never have children .He says nothing about this diagnosis to Anne, his beloved wife. Nor does he tell her about a large debt he has taken out. It is as if Bruno were a man without any qualities or talents. A mediocre man who has lost all pride. Though now everything appears hazy in his memory. Like a river that flows peacefully, showing no signs of the hidden currents at work below. But at times those currents can return to the surface. Without warning.

Rachele laughs at the stranger with whom she chats online. And she leads us to discover the only feeling she knows – the poisonous bond which unites her parents. In public they seem tenderly in love, but behind closed doors, it’s all possession, fear, submission and pain. Rachele wants to be different, but can she really be so, when the only form of love she knows is violence?

An unflinching, fragmentary look at a handful of self-destructive, marginalized people, but taking as main focus the heroin-addicted Vanda Duarte.

In 1902 Switzerland, child laborer Emma is expected to thread needles, but just like children today, she desperately tries to live her dream of playing the violin.

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

After fourteen years away from her homeland, Salomé is forced to return to Cape Verde to see her dying brother. During her stopover at Lisbon airport, Águeda, a cleaning lady, recognizes Salomé as "Mila", her childhood friend. Águeda invites Salomé to leave the airport and spend the stopover at her home, with the women of her family. The neighborhood transports her on a spiritual journey, whose destination reveals a painful bond with her homeland.

A widowed working-class father falls in love with a struggling, poor artist.

For teenage twins Robert and Elena, a weekend can seem endless yet still fly by. Time almost stands still while discussing philosophy, lying in a blissful cornfield near a remote gas station. They are in their own little world, a twin world of twin games and twin love. A confined world where emotions rise, where pressure mounts into rage… The turmoil of adolescence.

In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the silence and complicity that surround her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance.

Nicole is a woman who carefully controls every aspect of her life, down to the smallest detail. Her little girl Lucy is an eight-year-old who is lonely and troubled.

Teo has a good job, a fiancee, a lover, no intention to assume any responsibility in his life. Meeting Emma, a blind woman, will upset his convictions.

Nina and her two friends share trepidations and desires, amid adolescent games and self-discovery. As the girls engage in ever new challenges, Nina immerses herself in her own hesitations.

An unrepentant prodigal son straight out of a Russian jail returns to his hometown, Asht, to help his mother die with dignity. But his debts in his hometown are many and long overdue, the townspeople are tough as nails, and he soon gets more than he expected from the quiet village. In this dark comedy, his third feature, writer-director Jamshed Usmonov cast the population of Asht as its own persuasive self and his own mother and brother as the fractured yet formidable domestic couple.

A man in his forties has had enough. He leaves his loveless family, uninspiring job and fake friends and tries to find something more. He meets a young woman he falls for, but she puts him on the test.

The story of a young couple who live in a small town with their four-year-old daughter. The husband is so caught up in his work as a policeman that he gradually becomes increasingly alienated from his wife and daughter who become ever closer to one another as they discover the new town. It is only a matter of time before the conflicts within the family manifest themselves.

Michele "Mike" Lo Russo is a young Italian boxer who has moved to Hamburg to start a professional boxing career. When his German manager refuses to renew his contract, he returns to Trieste, where his older sister Anna lives. Orphaned at an early age, Anna has dedicated her life to her brother's success. His triumph in boxing seems to be the only way to a better life, both for him and for herself. Once again, Anna helps Mike by begging his old coach to train him again. But the hoped-for boxing matches fail to materialize and Mike becomes increasingly impatient. Bargni, a manager whom Mike met in Germany, persuades him to get involved in the illegal fight club business. After Mike hesitates at first, he finally accepts the tempting offer and enters a world without rules.

On a remote volcanic island that everybody wants to leave, little Nana learns to stay. Her mother, Nia, went into exile right after she was born and Nana grows up in the family of her father. One day, the family learns that Nia is ill. Nana begins to develop high fevers and is sent to the foot of a volcano for treatment. There she encounters a world steeped in magical realism, between dreams and reality. Later, when Nana is a teenager, her mother Nia finally returns to the island.