Drowning

Studying to become a teacher in 1950s Northern Italy, Sicilian immigrant Pietro is joined by his big brother Giovanni. Pietro shows considerable promise in his field, prompting illiterate Giovanni to take on even the toughest jobs in order to support his sibling's academic pursuits.

A study of the friendship between a Chinese woman and a fisherman who came to Italy from Yugoslavia many years ago, who live in a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon.

Carlo and Elisa are a successful couple. He’s a university professor and writer facing a creative block; she’s a brilliant, sharp-witted journalist, known for her internationally published editorials. They live in Rome, moving between accomplishments and routine, affection and something that might be fading. In search of new energy, they travel to Morocco with their lifelong friends, Anna and Paolo, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Vittoria—bright, curious, a little eccentric. Tensions soon rise.

Adriano is a middle-aged man living in a dilapidated villa in Tuscany, when a group of young idealistic students arrives to restore the villa's vineyards.

The son of the owner of a large Italian cheese factory is kidnapped, but as the factory is on the verge of bankruptcy the owner hatches a plan to use the ransom money as reinvestment in the factory.

At the end of the 1950s in Africo, a small village in the southern valley of Aspromonte, a woman dies in childbirth because a doctor fails to arrive on time. No road connects Africo with the other villages. In the wake of this tragedy, all of Africo’s citizens -including children - abandon their usual occupations and unite to build their own road. Giulia, the new schoolteacher, comes from the North with a mission to teach standard Italian to help bring cultural cohesion with Africo and the rest of Italy. But she will have to contend with the local mafioso Don Totó, who is determined to ensure this the town remains cut off, and thus, under his power.

In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.

Young Father Giulio returns to Rome, where he was born and raised, to replace a priest who has left the clergy to start a family. He is delighted to reunite with his loved ones, especially his mother, sister, and old friends. Once radical leftists like Giulio himself, the latter are now each coping in their own way with the defeat of the revolution. Soon, however, Giulio realizes that despite his best efforts, he seems unable to solve the problems troubling those around him.

Anna and her son Valerio run away from a husband and a father who has destroyed the love of their family with beatings and anger. They seek refuge in Turin, with Carla, a lifelong friend, an actress and a woman who lives against the grain, who welcomes them, and with the example of her own experience, will show them the way to a just and possible rebirth.

A jazz musician seeks refuge from a lynch mob on a remote island, where he meets a hostile game warden and the young object of his attentions.