Astra Cinematografica

Biographic film chronicling the last year of the life of the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, who falls in love with a girl from a wealthy family. Her parents are against this relationship and stop financial help. Modigliani worked and died in abject poverty in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris, France.

Maria, a prostitute, meets Cesare in a police station, a drunkard reporter. Cesare falls in love with her and wants to save her from her bleak life but the girl refuses any help.

Three directors collaborated on the Italian documentary Continente Perduto. The "lost continent" of the title is Asia, specifically Indonesia, here lovingly photographed in Ferraniacolor by Mario Craveri, Giannni Rafaldi and Franco Bernetti. Highlights include a Cantonese wedding aboard a floating junk, the annual wheat and rice harvest, the animal-sacrifice rites at the rim of a volcano, a ceremonial chariot race, and a bevy of Balinese dancers. Though there's no story to speak of, the film has the rhythm and pace of a "continuity" picture. Continente Perduto was the winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Filming amid the flaxen wheat fields of Sicily, Vittorio De Seta documents the everyday rituals of farmers during harvest time.

Sicily, Granitola, 1955. At the first light of dawn, the fishermen set out in their boats for open water, timing the rhythm of their oars to murmured chants. They set their nets in the sea, regulate the cords, organize the boats in a square. The men’s work becomes increasingly harder as the tuna are hoisted onto the boats, wriggling, beating their tails until death arrives and the water is tinged with blood.