The personal stories of Eva, Romina, Silvia, Elettra and Hazem, Mimmo, Zina and Elena, Enrico, Giuseppe, Ursula and Bianca, Emanuele and the others, are intertwined with the universality of the human experience, through the mediation of the filmmakers' gazes, hence becoming bearers of new interpretations. Reflections, unique and precious, which come true in a thousand different ways and only when finally the meeting takes place, in the darkness of the cinema, with the mind - and heart - of all the spectators willing to follow the common thread of the stories of lives within Biografilm Italia competition.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2024 / 79’)
Three lives intertwine in a psychiatric community in Palermo. Giuseppe does not want to grow old, he spends his days immersed in rock with his headphones, and in the spring he will reach the limit of his stay in the community. Ursula has found love, but between illness and medication it’s not easy to take care of another person. Bianca is a communist, she misses the world out there and feels caged, away from everything and her children. In the community's still time, everyone is waiting for something so as not to disappear.
World Premiere
(Doc / France / 2024 / 50’)
A filmed diary that the director, Silvia Staderoli, addresses to her 16-year-old daughter and to all teenage girls around the world. In the context of France in the era of “Me too,” her daughter's hopes for a better future collide with the reality of daily, systemic gender violence. The “land of women” of the title does not exist, but alongside the bitter realization of a male-oriented society, the tension and collective effort for radical change emerges. Between cinema, confession, and literature, the film is a chronicle of life moments and encounters with women committed to fighting gender violence.
World Premiere
(Doc / Italy / 2024 / 64’)
On the table in her office, psychotherapist Eva Pattis Zoja keeps a container with sand. The sand records the images her fingers trace on its surface, but not the words: psychic trauma is a fracture that prevents feelings from emerging and narrative from flowing. The traumas of patients affected by wars and natural disasters but also, perhaps, the trauma of Eve herself. Images of the sands thus mingle with those of History and those of her own life. An inner investigation, delving into the personal and the collective nightmare of the victims of genocide. For a trauma is never just an individual matter: it is transmitted between generations, reflected in History.
Italian Premiere
(Doc / Belgium, France, Italy / 2024 / 97’)
Like many villages in Southern Italy, Riace has suffered from massive rural exodus. One day, a boat carrying 200 Kurds refugees ran aground on the beach. The villagers come to their aid: little by little, migrants and villagers will rehabilitate abandoned houses, revive business and ensure a future for the village. 20 years of harmony make Riace a model for welcoming migrants, but also the target of the populist wave. So Domenico Lucano, the mayor of Riace, faces 13 years in prison and forces the village into a dilemma: resist or disappear. A snapshot of an unprecedented event in Italian political and judicial history, the second chapter written by the directors of Un paese di Calabria, presented at Biografilm in 2016.
World Premiere
(Doc / Italy / 2024 / 73’)
It’s June 7, 1984, when Enrico Berlinguer, during an election rally in Padua, feels a sudden illness. He carries through with his speech, but shortly thereafter goes into a coma for four days, until his death on June 11. On June 13, the most impressive political funeral in the history of the Republic takes place in Rome: two million people take to the streets. The film offers an accurate and renewed narrative and visual reconstruction of those 7 days that shook Italy. It recounts with a new perspective a moment of passage and an end: that of a beloved politician, of an entire party, of an idea of country, perhaps even the end of an era.
Italian Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Belgium / 2024 / 83’)
Elettra and Hazem arrive in Belgium at the same time, him after a painful journey from Gaza, her to study documentary film. Their first moments together are revealing and trigger the desire to know each other through the medium of film. The camera becomes the tool they share for understanding. Through the images of their lives, we are plunged into the details of the meeting of two worlds. The displacements they endure strengthen their wish to resist a widely divided society; the act of filming is their commitment to justice. Being confronted to the rigidity of Hazem’s asylum procedure, they embark on an exile, an inner migration to reach a more equitable and welcoming place.
World Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Italy / 2024 / 72’)
The ordinary life of a young woman growing up in Bologna, consisting of work, sports and evenings with friends, takes an unexpected and dramatic turn when her mother, Berta, is arrested. We follow not only the protagonist's family affairs, but also her complex social network. Romina's story could be repeated identically in any Western metropolis because it reflects a universal reality: the precariousness of suburban life today. Through Berta's imprisonment, the injustice of the prison system - a controversial aspect of our society - materializes. Romina offers a realistic portrait of urban life, made up of social fragility, precarity and prison.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy, Romania / 2024 / 65’)
In 2005, two Ukrainian psychiatrists began to observe recurring symptoms of psychological distress in many Eastern European women returning from Italy: insomnia, anxiety, depression, panic attacks and in the most severe hallucinations and suicidal instincts. These women had one characteristic in common: they all worked as caregivers. The two psychiatrists called this Italy syndrom condition. The documentary will follow the lives of Corina, a woman affected by this syndrome after years of working in Italy and who is slowly trying to build a new life for herself after so much suffering, and that of Natalia, a woman who is instead experiencing on her own skin the harsh conditions of working as a caregiver in Italy: isolated, thousands of miles away from her children, alone. Two women who reflect each other over and over again and who struggle for a different future.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Fiction / Italy / 2024 / 50’)
Just beyond the Kármán line lies a small town in the heart of southern Italy: Grottaglie. In August 2017, the US State Department announces the construction, on the soil of Grottaglie, of the first European spaceport. Giorgio and Dario, from the artistic collective Sano/Sano, put on their space helmets and envision “2021”, a project aimed at eliminating distances between the Earth and the sky. Volunteers and friends of the duo fight the scorching summer to complete their mission: building a rocket and form a crew ready to fly. "SPAZZI - a community in suborbit" tells of boundaries being swept away: of friendships that overcome space and time, of a small town capable of touching the universe.
Italian Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Germany, Italy / 2024 / 73’)
Naples is an ever-changing stage, inhabited by characters born to be movie heroes. One of these is Ciretta: a wonderful voice and natural talent for performance, he is a 20-year-old street crook who worships Our Lady of Sorrows, so much so that he raises money for her procession. But the abandoned theater he lives in has been acquired and the new owner would like to turn it into yet another B&B in the historic center of Naples. Ciretta will have to find a solution, for himself and for the statue of his beloved Madonna. A tender and melancholic story among the hidden lives of an extraordinary city, telling of a daily struggle in the world of tourism and speculation.
