Scanners

In 1981 Scanners consacrated David Cronenberg to the general public, turning him into the visionary that populates, feeds, tells our worst nightmares.

Cameron Vale is a misfit living on the fringe of society because of severe mental disorders. A large multinational company inserts him into the Ripe program of the Consec arms industry. The purpose of the program is to create scanners, beings with telepathic powers and able to act on the psychic abilities of others.

An Andalusian Dog

During a holiday, in the winter of 1927, the Catalan painter Salvador Dalì decided together with Luis Buñuel to make a short film. The two artists wrote the script in just six days, applying the paranoid-critical method that Dalì was working on in those years. “An Andalusian Dog” was born thanks to a financial loan from Luis Buñuel’s mother and involves a small cast, including the two artists, without professional actors. It was first screened in September 1929 at Studio Ursulines in front of an excellent audience including Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and André Breton. The short film turns out to be a truly unexpected success, contrary to what the two artists had foreseen.

Los Olvidados – I figli della violenza

The master of surrealist cinema Luis Buñuel stages the dramatic condition of street children in post-war Mexico City with an eye to Italian neorealism. Award as Best Director at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, the social drama marks the return of Buñuel to Spain, recounting the lives of children predestined victims of an adverse destiny from which it is possible to escape only through dreams or death.

Uomini contro

Masterpiece of Francesco Rosi with the great Gian Maria Volonté. Set against the backdrop of the First World War on the Asiago plateau, the film traces the events of the division commanded by General Leone where the young lieutenant Sassu, a former university student interventionist, serves, moved from Trentino where the fighting is minor. He is reporting directly to the commander of the Company Lieutenant Ottolenghi, a disillusioned veteran with socialist ideas that on several occasions will oppose the unnecessary or unnecessarily punitive orders of superiors to find death during another useless attack. Lieutenant Sassu, during the months of his time at the front, will witness the unpreparedness of the High Command.

Il bambino di Mâcon

In the cathedral of the city of Mâcon, the most brazen baroque frays in absolute decay, commodification reigns and the Church operates its word of evil. Following the birth of a child, the criminal projects of power are installed in the minds and actions of people who then commit acts or channel them. All set up according to the rules of a vast theatrical show, baroque and hallucinatory, punctuated according to the structure in three acts, with prologue, two interludes and an epilogue. Greenaway decided to make the film because intrigued by some photos of Oliviero Toscani with images of newborns used as objects, this is film’s core: accessorize human lives, make a newborn an object of exchange, exacerbate and destroy the concept of nativity.

Red

Last chapter of the Color Trilogy: Valentine, model and twenty-three year old student, lives alone in Geneva. Her boyfriend, a jealous and nagging guy, sometimes calls her from London, where he works. One evening the girl accidentally runs over a dog, which belongs to a retired magistrate to whom he had escaped. At 65, he is a loner, grumpy and of rare words, whose only activity consists in spying on the inhabitants of the neighboring houses and intercepting phone calls, even the most intimate. But regardless of the dog accident, the judge has an interest in Valentine. A strange relationship is then established between the two, made of shyness and discretion.

White

The second film from Krysztof Kieslowski’s acclaimed Color Trilogy. Karol, a Polish hairdresser who lives in Paris, is forced by his French wife to accept divorce because of his impotence. He returned clandestinely to Poland with the help of an occasionally known compatriot, gradually creeped into the circle of speculators and got rich. To get his wife back, whom he is always in love with, he sets up a complicated plan.

Blue

First movie of the Three Colors trilogy by Krzysztof Kieślowski. According to Kieślowki, the subject of the film is liberty, in particular emotional liberty. When her husband and daughter die in a car accident, Julie is heartbroken. To free herself from her past and start a new life Julie sells the house, destroys memories and burns the unfinished symphony of the deceased husband. Julie would like a life without more property or ties, but fate brings her back to life and love.

Piovono pietre

Winner of the Gran Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Ken Loach gives life to another representation of real life and social drama by telling the story of a father, with limited means, and his endless adventures to buy his daughter a new dress for her First Holy Communion, in order to reach regain his dignity as a man and father.

Ladybird Ladybird

Ken Loach directs Crissy Rock, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1994 Berlin International Film Festival, in this powerful and painful portrait of Maggie, a woman and mother of the working class in the 80s English backgrund. Her life has always been a struggle between misery and harshness, she had four children from four different men and takes care of them by singing in pubs; she has a violent temper but in her own way she loves her children very much. When her children are taken from social services, she will start a battle to get them back, only the meeting with a Paraguayan political refugee will give her a hope of happiness