A section to explore and promote cinematographic works that challenge the traditional boundaries of narrative and visual representation, going beyond the conventional concept of fiction, where the barriers between reality and imagination are broken. Documentaries that venture into the territory of the surreal and works of emerging directors who dare to experiment with new narrative and visual techniques. Beyond Fiction presents itself as a platform to reflect on the power of cinema to transform, inspire and provoke, because the colours of cinema are just a series of infinite nuances, there to be explored.
Italian Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Fiction / Switzerland / 2024 / 89’)
She built a house for herself. Unfortunately it turned out to be a masterpiece. Irish designer Eileen Gray builds a refuge on the Côte d‘Azur in 1929. Her first house is a discrete, avant-garde masterpiece. She names it E.1027, a cryptic marriage of her initials and those of Jean Badovici, with whom she built it. Le Corbusier, upon discovering the house, becomes intrigued, obsessed. He later covers the walls with murals and publishes photos of them. Gray describes these paintings as vandalism and demands restitution. He ignores her wishes and instead builds his famous Cabanon directly behind E.1027, which dominates the narrative of the site to this day. A story about the power of female expression, and men’s desire to control it.
Italian Premiere
(Doc / France, Tunisia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus / 2023 / 110’)
The life of Olfa, a Tunisian woman and mother of four daughters, oscillates between shadow and light. One day, her two eldest daughters disappear. To fill their absence, director Kaouther Ben Hania summons professional actresses and enacts an offbeat cinematic device with the intention of revealing the story of Olfa and her daughters. An intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, generational transition and sisterhood that will challenge the very foundation of our societies.
Italian Premiere, Second Film
(Fiction / Ireland, UK / 2024 / 105’)
There are 80,000 native Irish speakers in Ireland. 6,000 live in the North of Ireland. Three of them became a rap group called Kneecap. This is the real life story of how this anarchic Belfast trio became the unlikely figureheads of a civil-rights movement to save their mother tongue.
Italian Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Fiction / USA / 2024 / 100’)
Autobiography of a debut, examination of art and self-centeredness, study of the figure of a filmmaker. Memory and fantasy, documentary and fiction mingle in the work of director Zia Anger and her alter ego Vita (Odessa Young). A game of mirrors revolving around a disastrous first film work, whose production is derailed by the young director's mix of enthusiasm, inexperience and self-centeredness. Vita / Zia Anger finds herself more than a decade later reflecting on the person she was at the time, what makes up our personal history, and the nature of artistic truth and subjectivity.
Italian Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Fiction / Argentina, Germany, Switzerland / 2024 / 82’)
Yoseli has a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on her back and has always wanted to travel, but she was arrested at the airport for drug trafficking. Nacho is a trans man who was arrested for fraud and started a rock band in prison. Gentle or rough, blond or clean-shaven, cis or trans, long-term inmates or newly admitted: in this hybrid musical, the inmates of the Buenos Aires Women's Prison reenact their lives and, between reality and fantasy, imagine a possible future by dancing and singing. Reas is a collective work that proposes a new look at prison. A film about community, about belonging, about those bonds that can keep love and hope alive in a place of violence and confinement.
Italian Premiere
(Fiction / USA / 2023 / 104’)
A picaresque journey through the cities and woods of the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina, gets her first glimpse of the wider world on a class trip to Washington, D.C. Separated from her schoolmates, she embarks on a road trip in search of America. Along the way, she falls in with a variety of strange factions, each living out their own alternative realities in our present day.
