Spring Edition 2022 - St Louis Italian Film Festival

Enjoy twelve Italian films—dramas, comedies and documentaries during the 2022 Italian Film Festival's Spring Edition being held online from March 11 through April 3, 2022. All films are shown in Italian with English subtitles. The Italian community in St Louis thanks Barbara Klein for organizing this yearly event. All online screenings are free. 

Links and codes to the screenings are sent to everyone who has subscribed to the email list of the Italian Film Festival. To sign up, please send an email to [email protected]. For further information on the film festival, make sure to visit: www.italianfilmfests.org


DOCTOR ON CALL - UNA NOTTE DA DOTTORE 

Director, Guido Chiesa, Comedy, 2021, 98 min.
March 11, 2PM CST until March 12, 2AM CST - available 12 hours
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Pierfrancesco is a 65-year-old doctor who makes house visits during the nightshift. He’s a grumpy man, full of aches and pains and very rough with his patients. One night he’s involved in a road collision with Mario, a thirty-year-old rider for a food delivery service. Mario is uninjured, but his bicycle is destroyed. The accident also causes Pierfrancesco sciatica to flare up, making it impossible for him to drive. Both of their jobs are in jeopardy, but the doctor has an idea that could help them both: “remotely guided” by Pierfrancesco via a wireless headset, Mario visit his patients, and they’ll also carry out Mario’s delivery in Pierfrancesco’s car. After a range of daring (mis)adventures, they will learn to support each other, and the night will end with their lives both changed for the better.


​THOU SHALT NOT HATE - NON ODIARE

Director, Mauro Mancini, Drama, 2020, 95 min.
March 12, 2PM CST until March 13, 3AM CST - available 12 hours

Simone is an established surgeon with a satisfying life. During canoe training, he witnesses a car accident and, as a doctor, he intervenes to save the victim. When he discovers a Nazi tattoo on his chest, he hesitates, leaving the man to his fate. In the following days, Simone, tormented by guilt, starts investigating and finds the victim's family in a working-class neighborhood.

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WINE ROADS - SULLE STRADE DEI VINI

Director, Paolo Casalis, Documentary, 2021, 60 min.
March 13, 2PM CST until March 14, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

A group of friends vacation along the bike paths of South Tyrol becomes an opportunity to tell the stories of a land and culture through its wines. Nell'era del turismo lento e di prossimità, Sulle strade dei vini è un viaggio nella regione più bike-friendly d'Italia: quasi 500 chilometri di piste ciclabili, il sogno di ogni cicloturista. Director Paolo Casalis, who also gave us the film Barolo Boys, returns to tell the world of wine through a trip of winery visits, meetings with more than twenty wine producers, toasts and tastings. Biodynamic and resistant vineyards, international grapes and autoctone varieties, tradition and innovation. if it is true that the world of wine can take a wide variety of different paths, even the less traveled or ones that others will only take in the future.. here they are really trying it all with courage and determination. Whether we like it or not.


VITTI D'ARTE, VITTI D'AMORE

Director, Fabrizio Corallo, Documentary, 2021, 80 min.
March 18, 2PM CST until March 19, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

A documentary focused on one of the best-known female faces in Italian cinema, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. Monica Vitti is a name that immediately refers to the great cinema, that of Antonioni, of which she was his muse, and of Monicelli, with whom she collaborated several times. But there were many other filmmakers who wanted her in front of their camera, from Dino Risi to Luciano Salce, up to the surrealist Buñuel. It is a tribute to her career and her life. It traces the artistic rise of a star, divided between cinema and TV, where she has not only acted in TV series but was also a guest in various programs. Inevitably, one cannot fail to mention the private life of this woman, capable of being defined as sunny and at the same time introverted. Many people, from friends and colleagues, to critics and writers, and costume experts, share their memories. Despite being forced by her illness to avoid the stage and the spotlight, Vitti remained an international movie star until her death February 2, 2022.


​3/19

Director, Silvio Soldini, Drama, 2021, 120 min.
March 19, 2PM CST until March 20, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

The life of Camilla, a successful lawyer with a young adult daughter, is upset on a rainy night in Milan. A traffic accident in which she is involved causes the death of a young immigrant and pushes her to an investigation that will bring her far from places and situations she is most familiar with. While on this journey, she will meet Bruno, and with him she will rediscover herself.


STRACCI

Director, Tommaso Santi, Documentary, 2021, 52 min. 
March 20, 2PM CST until March 21, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

Stracci is a documentary that starts from Prato and travels around the world, addressing the issue of the environmental impact of the fashion industry. The heart of the documentary is the story of an extraordinary, ancient and highly topical circular economy experience: that of the recycling of wool by the textile industries of the Prato district, an example to follow.


ARIAFERMA - THE INNER CAGE

Director, Leonardo di Costanzo, Drama, 2021, 117 min. 
March 25, 2PM CST until March 26, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

An old prison built in the 19th century, located in a remote and unspecified part of the Italian territory, is being decommissioned. As a result of bureaucratic holdups the transfers have been blocked and a dozen inmates are left, along with a few guards, waiting to be sent to new destinations. In a suspended atmosphere, the rules that keep them separate are slackened and new forms of relationship emerge among the remaining men.

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MOMENTI DI TRASCURABILE FELICITA' - ORDINARY HAPPINESS

Director, Daniele Luchetti, Comedy/Drama, 2019, 93 min.
March 26, 2PM CST until March 27, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

One morning Paolo hops on his scooter off to work. For his daily bravado he crosses an intersection with the red lights on, gets hit by a truck and dies. What if for a miscalculation in Paradise, you get an extra hour and a half to live after death trying to achieve what really counts in life...being with the people you care your partner, your children, your friends and with them enjoy just little things! How to cram happiness in an hour and half?

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PUPUS

Director, Miriam Cossu Sparagano Ferraye, Documentary, 2021, 33 min.
March 27, 2PM CST until March 28, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

Borgo Vecchio, Palermo: we are in the great universe of the Puppets’ Opera from the Sicilian tradition, we are in the small theater-laboratory of the Mancuso family. Carmelo, son of a master puppeteer, lives in this place full of fantasy and imagination. He plays with the verses he has heard so many times during the shows: trying to imitate the grown-up tone of his father’s voice, he gives life to the puppets with arcane dexterity. His eyes shine in that fairy tales’ world, where raw pieces of wood take shape to narrate, as in an eternal return, the chivalrous stories of love and war. Here’s how a young man just at the beginning of a great knowledge makes his way towards his future.


PROGRAMMA DI CORTOMETRAGGI - SHORTS PROGRAM

April 1, 2PM CST until April 3, 2PM CST - available 48 hours 

Seven recent short films will be presented in one short film program lasting approximately 115 minutes. Each short is preceded by a director video. The audience will vote on their favorite short favorite short.


IL BAMBINO NASCOSTO - THE HIDDEN CHILD

Director, Roberto Ando', Drama, 2021, 110 min. 
April 2, 2PM CST until April 3, 2AM CST - available 12 hours

Gabriele Santoro lives in a working-class district of Naples and is a professor at the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella, where he teaches piano. One morning, while he is shaving, the postman sounds the buzzer to tell him a parcel has arrived. He presses the button to open the door and, before going to pick it up, stops to wash his face. In that brief span of time, a ten-year-old boy sneaks into his apartment and hides. “Il maestro”—that is what they call him in the neighborhood—will not discover the boy until late in the evening. When he does, he recognizes the intruder as Ciro, who lives with his parents and siblings in the top floor of the same building. Asked to explain the reason for his flight, Ciro does not talk. Nonetheless, the maestro, acting on instinct, decides to let him hide in his apartment, embarking on a singular, and tenacious, defiance of Ciro’s enemies. Based on the novel “Il bambino nascosto” by the director, Roberto Andò.


​FORMAGGI D'AUTORE - ARTISANAL CHEESES

Director, Marco Leopoldi, Documentary, 2018, 33 min.
April 3, 3:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time til 3:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on April 5
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This documentary tells the story of small dairymen and cheesemakers of the Alta Val Brembana, an Alpine area near Bergamo. Our journey starts in the stables and production facilities during winter. Then we travel to the storage areas where the cheese is kept to age. The dedication, antique traditions and love for cheese is extraordinary and the results are the famous cheeses of the area—Agrì, Stracchino all'Antica and others—along with local culinary specialties, such as polenta taragna and nosècc, that you will want to try next time you're in Italy!