Sicilia Film Commission

Antonio and Agostino grew up together in a small town in Sicily; they dreamt of living a different life, somewhere else. Now thirty-year-olds, they both live abroad but they lost touch years ago. When Antonio discovers that the house he grew up in, which had been empty for a long time, is about to be sold at auction, he decides to leave and reconnects with his childhood friend. But their lives have changed a lot. Old conflicts and new revelations bring them through Europe on a truck journey.

Inspired by real life events, Madame Luna tells the story of an Eritrean refugee who is washed ashore in Libya and survives to become one of the most notorious human smugglers, with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. Now trapped in Italy and forced to experience the brutalising reality endured by the people she has exploited in the past, Madame Luna must try to find a way out before she is recognized and brought to justice. In the process she forms a powerful bond with a younger version of herself.

Inside a warehouse in Palermo, a group of people smashes a man’s arm to pieces with a wheelie bag packed with weights. This is the method used by an amateur criminal organization that fractures the limbs of its willing victims before staging fake accidents and raking in the insurance payouts. Vincenzo recruits the individuals from among the down-and-outs that haunt the city streets, where Luisa is a habitué, since she gets her crack there. Vincenzo’s problems suddenly get worse, though, after a series of mistakes shut him out of the gang, and Luisa is now his only chance: he convinces her to have her bones broken.

Summer 1994. Berlusconi has come into power and 16-year-old Elena, listening to Nirvana and starting to develop a political consciousness, can't wait to bring him down. Unfortunately her parents have other plans and, like every year, they head to the same boring summer camp. This year however they're all in for a surprise...

As in a long suite, the cinematographic story of a country, Italy, in its current physiognomy, in a film made only of images and music. A home atlas of wonders that are sometimes misunderstood and of places known, loved and often lost. And of people cultured in their living in a highly stratified territory, between the still usable grandeur of the past and the apparent stasis of the present. A country marked by strong inequalities and nevertheless in continuous transformation in the difficult race towards sustainable development, problematically suspended between the old and the new and the increasingly difficult search for a balance to safeguard its éthos.

Francesco is a street boy who lives by his wits in Palermo. One day he accompanies a friend to the casting of an important film that will be shot in the city and so, almost by chance, he too finds himself taking part in the selections. In this circumstance, Francesco finds himself having to retrace the salient events of his life that made him the boy he is. The early loss of innocence due to a difficult childhood, marked by the drama of his mother's premature death and the harassment of an excessively authoritarian father, plunged him into the degraded context of street life. The subsequent encounters dragged him towards an impetuous and unruly adolescence, which led him first under the protection of social services and then to correctional institutions. Thanks to cinema, Francesco finds himself faced with the opportunity to completely change his life. Will he be able to seize it and redeem himself from an inexorable destiny, which seems to have already been written?

Salvo, a Sicilian fisherman, is devastated by the tragic death at sea of his child during a bath at the "glass beach" and to escape the unbearable pain he leaves his village and goes to work far away as a offshore welder on an oil platform. When he receives news of his father’s stroke, he returns to Sicily to sell his father’s house with the idea of using the proceeds to obtain shared custody of his daughter in Calabria. But here his life will change again thanks to the activities of the catwalks that cross the Strait and the presence of people and unexpected affections, in the landscape of the coasts and villages of Messina and Villa San Giovanni.

100 years ago, a terrible earthquake, followed by an equally terrible tidal wave, devastated and largely destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria.

The story of a judge against the mafia, Cesare Terranova. The first magistrate to have sensed the dangers of organized crime and to have instructed the first trials against Mafia bosses, when the word mafia was still spoken in a whisper. Terranova was killed on September 25, 1979 with his collaborator, Marshal Lenin Mancuso.

Escape from home, from the neighborhood. Then a letter written to his mother to apologise, to alleviate the sense of guilt. This is how, through autofiction, the director's past is scanned before our eyes in clear, inflammatory images. A train journey that becomes an inner journey to rework memories, to choose what to take and what to let go.