Donatella Palermo

The Falling Sky

Documentary about Indigenous peoples' profound connection to nature and their struggle against deforestation, a grave threat to their way of life and the ecosystem they call home.

GEN_

At Milan’s Niguarda public hospital, the unconventional Dr. Bini leads a bold mission overseeing aspiring parents undergoing in vitro fertilization and the journeys of individuals reconciling their bodies with their gender identities. He navigates the constraints set by a conservative government and an aggressive market eager to commodify bodies.

Of Dogs and Men

16-year-old Dar returns to her kibbutz seeking her lost dog amid a terror spree, navigating horrors while encountering the unfolding disaster beyond the fence, caught between those seeking revenge and those keeping faith in humanity.

Luce

A young woman and a voice on the phone in a cold, mountainous southern Italy. A thin line separates needs from desires and imagination from reality.

In the Mirror

The film is freely inspired by the great actress Monica Vitti, but it is in no way a biopic. It is the story of a woman named Monica, who loses her memory and regains meaning in her life.

In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis

A chronicle of the first nine years of Pope Francis' pontificate, including trips to 53 countries, focusing on his most important issues - poverty, migration, environment, solidarity, and war - while also giving rare access to the public life of the pontifical.

The Fabulous Ones

It often happens that at the moment of death, transgender individuals are shorn of their identity. Their families are ashamed, the funeral takes place in secret, and on the tomb appears the name the deceased had before their transition, in one stroke nullifying the entire life path they had chosen. The same thing happened to Antonia. Her girlfriends gather to honor her memory and give her back her identity denied. In telling her story, the film’s stars, all drawn from the variegated transgender world, interweave the narrative with tales of their own lives, experiences, and memories.

Leonora addio

A tale of the three funerals for the ashes of Italian writer Luigi Pirandello intertwined with a murder committed by a young Sicilian immigrant boy in 1930s Brooklyn for what is described as a surreal, grotesque, complex narrative.

Last Words

The year is 2085 and no human babies have been born in over a decade. A group of disparate survivors respond to a call to meet in Athens, where the film’s narrator Jo, a boy of African descent, aims to make the world’s last film.

Notturno

A portrait of those trying to survive in the war-torn Middle East.

The Big Step

At the age of six, Dario watched the first moon flight on television. Since then, his dream has been to fly to the moon. For the past three decades, the ingenious but difficult by nature Dario has been building a moon rocket on his farm in the Veneto countryside. Rocket technology represents applied rocket science. Its systems are implemented on a do-it-yourself basis, and the components are obtained from the local hardware store. The initial launch of the rocket fails. The neighbor's cornfield burns down and Dario is arrested. When his Roman brother Mario hears about the difficulties that have arisen, he goes to his aid and Italy's secret space program finally gets going.

Faith

A community of monks lives isolated from the world, practicing martial arts and following the master’s strict rules. This film investigates their harsh life and the flow of Time in unique closed environment, to approach deep motivations of a radical choice, and the reasons that pushed the monks away from their affections.

Rainbow: A Private Affair

Summer 1943, Piedmont, Italy. Milton loves Fulvia who plays with his love: she only likes the depth of his thought and the letters he writes to her. One year later, Milton has joined the Resistance and fights beside other partisans. He learns during a conversation that Fulvia was secretly in love with his best friend Giorgio, a partisan like him. Milton decides to go find Giorgio in the Langhe region of Italy with all its misty hills...But Giorgio has just been arrested by the Fascists.

Fire at Sea

Capturing life on the Italian island of Lampedusa, a frontline in the European migrant crisis.

Wondrous Boccaccio

It's 1348. The plague has brutally hit Florence. A group of then young people, seven women and three men, rebel against the feeling of death that is about to swallow them. They flee the city and find refuge in an abandoned villa in the Tuscan hills. Here, between moral doubts and the tasks needed to survive, they kill time by telling each other stories until they will decide to return. The stories are varied - tragic, bizarre, funny or erotic - but common and central to all of them is the female presence.

The Island of the Fallen Angel

In 1924, a young police commissioner is relocated to a small island near Sicily. Adaptation of Carlo Lucarelli's novel of the same name, directed by Lucarelli himself in his directorial debut, which went unreleased after its lukewarm premiere at the Rome Film Festival.

Letters from Sahara

The story of a young Senegalese man who treks the Sahara, takes an immigrant boat bound for Italy, the attempts to eke out a living there - finally deciding to return to his native place. Vittorio De Seta's first fiction feature since 1969.

Cuore scatenato

In Sicily, in a time not yet forgotten, in the heart of a small secluded town populated by cicadas, ticks and venomous snakes, that which made a man a real man was not riches or power, but his honor. He had to defend his dignity against insults and village gossip. It took little to stoke the fire once lit, and no one was immune. One of the worst humiliations a man can suffer was to have an adulterous wife. A man so disgraced would bear the mark of shame, with all eyes of the community upon him. It was said that "his horns were sticking out" for all to see.

Sud Side Stori

In Roberta Torre's "true story of Romeo and Julet", Toni Giulietto is a vulnerable street singer and Little Tony-impersonator (who is himself an Italian Elvis-impersonator) who is constantly deceived and hoodwinked by almost everyone he knows. Romea is an attractive Nigerian immigrant who sells sex on the streets of Palermo to pay off her huge fee to the man who smuggled her in to the country. Various characters plot against each other and the plots, which draw in people from all the different social strata, spiral out of control as the tug-of-war between these different factions of Sicilian society is fought to the last.

Appassionate

Pina was born in Portugal but now lives in poor circumstances in Naples. Pina has two daughters, Rosa, who has been wearing a wedding dress since she was left stranded at the altar several years ago, and Caterina, who murdered a man who wronged her as he left the church following his wedding. Caterina winds up in prison alongside Maddalena, a prostitute who witnessed the murder and was inspired to kill a man in her own life who had hurt her. The incidents from these women's lives are interspersed with another story, set in 1929 and filmed in black-and-white, about a man who shoots his wife in a movie theater and must run to avoid the police.

Viol@

Marta works for a poll company, listening all day to other people's dreams while leading a cold and solitary life. Having just cut off a long relationship, she tries an online sex chat under an alias, meeting a man who begins to advance more and more audacious requests, until they decide to discover their respective identities.

To Die for Tano

Shot in his butcher shop by a rival clan during the Mafia wars of 1988, the Palermo Mobster Tano Guarrasi is mourned by his wife, four unmarried sisters and his daughter. But in truth, his death represents a kind of liberation for the women.

The Game of Shadows

A writer is haunted by eerie appearances after the death of his wife.

In the Highest of Skies

A group of pilgrims in the Vatican is trapped in an enclosed elevator. Then chaos erupts, and repressed urges come to the surface.