Carolina Cavalli’s ‘The Kidnapping of Arabella’ to Headline FLC’s 25th Open Roads: New Italian Cinema

Open Roads: New Italian Cinema celebrates its 25th anniversary edition at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, from May 28 through June 4, 2026.

Presented annually by Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà, this year’s edition showcases 15 features representing contemporary Italian filmmaking across a variety of genres.

The Opening Night film is Carolina Cavalli’s The Kidnapping of Arabella, a homage to sisterhood starring Venice Orizzonti Best Actress Award winner Benedetta Porcaroli as a 28-year-old who runs away with a girl she believes to be a younger version of herself, also featuring an unforgettable appearance by Chris Pine.

Making their North American debuts are Gianluca Matarrese’s I Want Her Dead, which follows two sisters-in-law with a longstanding feud in an inventive blend of high-tension documentary and expressive fiction; and Mosquitoes, the debut feature from sisters Valentina and Nicole Bertani, a stylish coming-of-age film set in 1997 that follows three girls who forge a summertime sisterhood.

Also making its North American premiere is A Year of School from returning Open Roads director Laura Samani, following a 17-year-old Swedish girl who enrolls in an all-male high school class in her new home of Trieste, with a magnetic performance by Venice Orizzonti Best Actor Award winner Giacomo Covi; and Nicolangelo Gelormini’s La gioia, a blackly comic tale starring Valeria Golino (who appears in an impressive four films in this year’s festival) as a high school teacher who forms an improbable relationship with one of her students who is working as a hustler to support his mother.

The intricacies of sexual relationships are also examined in acclaimed screenwriter Ludovica Rampoldi’s directing debut A Brief Affair, a mischievous comedy nominated for two Donatello Awards, including Best New Director; and Andrea De Sica’s The Eyes of Others, a satirical parable about obsession and the violence of power, both making their North American premieres in the festival.

Vibrant periods of Italian history are on display in Damiano Michieletto’s Primavera (which was written by Rampoldi), set in 18th-century Venice and centered on the relationship between a young orphan violin virtuoso and composer Antonio Vivaldi; and the North American premiere of Andrea Di Stefano’s My Tennis Maestro, a sports comedy set in the 1980s pairing a 13-year-old budding tennis star and a former pro on a shared journey of training and competing along the Italian coast.

This year’s festival will celebrate the 120th anniversary of the birth of Roberto Rossellini, one of 20th-century Italian cinema’s undisputed masters, with a special tribute screening of his 1946 film Paisan, the ambitious neo-realist drama set at the end of World War II that chronicles the liberation of Italy from a multitude of perspectives. The festival will also present the North American premiere of new documentary Roberto Rossellini, Living Without a Script from Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, and Andrea Paolo Massara, a dazzling portrait of the filmmaker using a wealth of archival footage.

Another documentary making its North American premiere: Massimiliano Camaiti’s Agnus Dei, a transfixing film that captures the mystical process by which two newborn lambs are prepared to provide wool for a sacred papal vestment.

Additional highlights include Open Roads veteran Mario Martone’s return to the festival with his newest film Fuori, nominated for nine Donatello Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Valeria Golino; and Virgilio Villoresi’s Orfeo, an entrancing take on the myth of Orpheus, combining beautiful 16mm photography, handcrafted sets, meticulous stop-motion animation, and in-camera optical effects, also making its North American debut.

“It’s always a pleasure to bring the most exciting new films in Italian cinema to our audience here in New York, and this year’s edition of Open Roads should prove especially stimulating, spotlighting some of Italy’s greatest up-and-coming talent, but also paying tribute to Roberto Rossellini, an absolutely pivotal, paradigm-shifting figure in the history of world cinema,” said Film at Lincoln Center Programmer Dan Sullivan. “Taken as a whole, this lineup offers some interesting propositions about the present and future of Italian cinema, while also deeply engaging with its incomparable past.”

“For 25 years, Open Roads has championed Italian cinema as a vibrant, contemporary cultural force, presented in a dynamic hub such as New York,” said Manuela Cacciamani, CEO of Cinecittà. “For Cinecittà, this is a wonderful milestone: a mark of success, but above all an opportunity to look ahead. Perhaps in light of this anniversary, the selection of Italian films heading to Film at Lincoln Center feels especially dazzling—young, experimental, and full of new energy. And there is a towering masterpiece: Paisà by Roberto Rossellini. A film that, 60 years ago, captured Italy with striking immediacy—alive with expressive urgency and hope. Here they are: this year’s Open Roads films offer a moving snapshot of a vital and evolving Italian cinema, one that gives us real reason to be hopeful for the road ahead. Open Roads knows—and will continue to know—how to embrace this creative energy.”

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS

All films will screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street).

Opening Night
The Kidnapping of Arabella / Il rapimento di Arabella
Carolina Cavalli, 2025, Italy, 107m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A delightfully idiosyncratic homage to sisterhood, Carolina Cavalli’s sophomore feature stars Benedetta Porcaroli as stifled 28-year-old Holly, who has a chance encounter with the titular 8-year-old (Lucrezia Guglielmino). Intuitively convinced that this girl is quite literally a younger version of herself, Holly runs away with Arabella and sets into motion a frequently comic and just as often profoundly reflective chain of events by which our heroines will strive to make peace with their pasts, their present, and their futures. Chris Pine makes an unforgettable appearance as Arabella’s deadpan novelist father. Porcaroli won the Orizzonti Best Actress Award at the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere, and she was nominated for a Donatello Award, alongside Cavalli’s nod for Best New Director, for her 2022 debut, Amanda. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

A Brief Affair / Breve storia d’amore
Ludovica Rampoldi, 2025, Italy, 100m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A delectably funny and mischievous sex comedy that mines romantic infidelity to unforgettable effect, decorated screenwriter Ludovica Rampoldi’s feature debut at the helm boasts an all-star cast more than up to the task of performing her meticulously crafted games of the heart. Pilar Fogliati’s Lea meets cute with Adriano Giannini’s Rocco and they begin a hesitant affair, which takes a turn when Lea becomes a patient of Rocco’s therapist wife (a brilliant, devious Valeria Golino). A Brief Affair’s pleasures are unmistakably throwback, but Rampoldi unspools her drama with a sly, modern energy that makes its twists and turns all the more delightful. Rampoldi earned a nomination for Best New Director at this year’s Donatello Awards, and Golino was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Agnus Dei
Massimiliano Camaiti, 2025, Italy, 73m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A fascinating, patient observation of papal arcana, Massimilano Camaiti’s hypnotic and sensitive documentary captures the process by which, each year at the Monastery of Saint Cecilia in Rome, two newborn lambs are blessed and afforded treatment befitting His Holiness himself, cared for closely by a cloistered nun who prepares their wool for its destiny as part of a sacred vestment to be worn by the Pope on June 29, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul. A Venice Film Festival selection in the College Cinema section, Agnus Dei is an indelible, transfixing glimpse at movingly mystical procedures carried out in a sacred, somewhat obscure place while the winds of change blow outside its walls.

Elisa
Leonardo Di Costanzo, 2025, Italy/Switzerland, 105m
Italian and French with English subtitles
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Leonardo Di Costanzo (The Inner Cage, Open Roads 2022) returns with this magnetic study of pathology and memory, based on real-life criminological research on perpetrators of violent crimes. Barbara Ronchi stars as the titular convict, 10 years into a prison sentence after having been convicted of murdering her sister without any apparent motive. Elisa claims to remember nothing about the crime and refuses to delve into her own past, but when she agrees to be a subject for a criminologist’s (Roschdy Zem) research, she finds herself confronting head-on her repressed feelings of guilt and the feasibility of something like redemption. Valeria Golino plays a supporting role as the grieving, insistent mother of a victim who meets with Zem’s criminologist. Nominated for two Donatello Awards, including Best Actress for Ronchi.

The Eyes of Others / Gli occhi degli altri
Andrea De Sica, 2025, Italy, 90m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The latest from Andrea De Sica (Children of the Night, Open Roads 2017) is a captivatingly wicked, satirical parable about sexual obsession and the violence of power. An enigmatic, surprising Jasmine Trinca (who won the Monica Vitti Award for Best Actress at the Rome Film Festival) stars as Elena, a woman whose arrival on the private island of an exorbitantly wealthy marquis (Filippo Timi) inaugurates a by turns passionately tender, sordid, and murderous chronicle of the clash between love, eros, and reckless, ruthless privilege. The rich textures and thick ambiance of The Eyes of Others are pure high-modernist 1960s Italian cinema, but De Sica unfurls the film’s winding intrigues with a contemporary sense of suspense, carnality, and visual boldness.

Fuori
Mario Martone, 2025, Italy/France, 115m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
One of Italian cinema’s true latter-day maestros, Mario Martone returns to Open Roads (following a three-film sidebar with his film Nostalgia in 2023) with this richly traced, dimensional, and surprising real-life tale of the bond between three women who meet in prison—one of whom, Goliarda Sapienza (Valeria Golino, operating at the height of her powers), is a well-known writer. After the three are released, their relationship deepens amid the challenges of rejoining society on the outside. Based on a 1983 novel by Sapienza, Fuori is marked by Martone’s characteristically elegant dramatization, performed and embodied with an entrancing brilliance by a never-better Golino. Nominated for nine Donatello Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Golino.

I Want Her Dead / Il quieto vivere
Gianluca Matarrese, 2025, Italy, 86m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Mining decades-long conflicts within his own family to analyze the ties that bind in a small Calabrian village, Gianluca Matarrese boldly melds high-tension documentary and expressive fiction in this tale of enmity between Luisa and Imma, two sisters-in-law with a mutual axe to grind (to say the least). Matarrese delves into the history underlying these two women’s longstanding feud and arrives at a tragicomic, inventive meditation on the metaphysical possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness.

La gioia
Nicolangelo Gelormini, 2025, Italy, 108m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A blackly comic tale about the fragility of human connection in a cynical world, Nicolangelo Gelormini’s new film stars Valeria Golino as a cloistered high school teacher living under the oppressive thumb of her parents. An improbable relationship emerges between her and one of her students (Saul Nanni), a hustler selling his body to support his mother, and the fallout finds sexual repression and quasi-nihilistic social ambition colliding to terrible, engrossing effect. In a year of standout roles for Golino, La gioia might mark her most playful, surprising performance.

Mosquitoes / Le bambine
Valentina Bertani, Nicole Bertani, 2025, Italy/Switzerland/France, 105m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The debut feature from sisters Valentina and Nicole Bertani is a swirling, stylish twist on the coming-of-age film. Set in 1997, the film follows 8-year-old Linda, who hails from a wealthy family, as she meets two other girls, Azzura and Martha, forging a summertime sisterhood that protects them in clashes major and minor with the selfish, petty agendas of the adults in their midst. An especially visually striking debut, Mosquitoes exists in a saturated hyperreality that is consummately engrossing, and announces the Bertani sisters as formidable portraitists of girlhood cast against the backdrop of an alternately beautiful and oppressive world.

My Tennis Maestro / Il maestro
Andrea Di Stefano, 2025, Italy, 125m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A sports comedy with a big heart, the latest from Andrea Di Stefano reteams the director with his Last Night of Amore star Pierfrancesco Favino for a charming, sensitive tale of the crushing expectations levied upon young athletic prodigies. Set in the late 1980s, the film follows 13-year-old Felice (an exceptional Tiziano Menichelli), a budding tennis star whose overbearing father hooks him up with Raul Getti (Favino), a flameout former pro with a new lithium prescription and a serious ladies-man streak. Raul and Felice set off on a shared journey of training and competing along the Italian coast as Felice struggles to figure out his identity outside of his on-the-court gifts, while Raul questions whether his eminently laid-back approach is a good fit for his star pupil.

Orfeo
Virgilio Villoresi, 2025, Italy, 74m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A visual adventure marked by formal ingenuity and a profound feeling for dream logic, Virgilio Villoresi’s singular take on the myth of Orpheus is an entrancing celebration of the possibilities of cinematic artifice. Villoresi reenvisions Orpheus as a loner pianist whose gaze meets that of a stranger, Eura, at the club where he performs one night; they fall in love, only for Eura to disappear almost as suddenly. Orpheus catches a glimpse of her some time later and follows her into what we come to realize is a visionary, sensual reimagination of the underworld. Adapted from Dino Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel Poema a fumetti, Villoresi’s feature debut combines beautiful 16mm photography, lovingly handcrafted sets, meticulously orchestrated stop-motion animation, and in-camera optical effects to arrive at a mesmerizing, artisanal work that announces its director as one of Italian cinema’s most exciting new voices. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.

Primavera
Damiano Michieletto, 2025, Italy, 111m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The improbable relationship between a young orphan violin virtuoso and composer Antonio Vivaldi in early-18th-century Venice is at the heart of acclaimed opera and theater director Damiano Michieletto’s debut feature. Cecilia (Tecla Insolia) lives at the Ospedale della Pietà, a secluded home for abandoned girls run by no-nonsense nuns, while she awaits the return of the man with whom she will enter an arranged marriage when he returns home from war. But when the Pietà brings on Vivaldi to serve as their new musical instructor, Cecilia’s life takes a turn, and the possibility of a hitherto unimagined future emerges. Written by Ludovica Rampoldi (whose own directorial debut, A Brief Affair, is also in this year’s edition of Open Roads), Primavera is a gripping, gorgeously realized meditation on the seldom-simple relationship between talent and destiny.

Roberto Rossellini, Living Without a Script / Roberto Rossellini, Più di una Vita
Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, Andrea Paolo Massara, 2025, Italy, 96m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
2026 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Roberto Rossellini, one of 20th-century Italian cinema’s undisputed masters. But as this rich new documentary shows us, Rossellini found himself at a particularly challenging point in his career 70 years earlier, in 1956, reeling from the mixed response to his legendary films with wife Ingrid Bergman as their marriage appears to be at the point of collapse. An invitation from the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to shoot a documentary about modern India marks a reinvention for Rossellini and an exciting new development in his iconic artistry. Using a wealth of archival footage, this deeply pleasurable documentary paints a dazzling portrait of Rossellini across the years leading up to his death in 1977, and is an ecstatic, cinephilic tribute to one of world cinema’s true titans.

A Year of School / Un anno di scuola
Laura Samani, 2025, Italy/France, 102m
English, Italian, and Swedish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The latest from Laura Samani (Small Body, Open Roads 2022) recasts a 1929 novella by Giani Stuparich in 2007 Trieste, following 17-year-old Swede Fredrika (Stella Wendick) as she enrolls in an otherwise all-male class at the local technical high school after her father uproots her family following his reassignment to the city by his employer. Fredrika’s friendships with the boys in her midst transform her, leaving her navigating the currents of burgeoning adulthood. Featuring an especially magnetic performance by Giacomo Covi, who won the Orizzonti Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Roberto Rossellini 120th Birthday Tribute Screening
Paisan / Paísa
Roberto Rossellini, 1946, Italy, 126m
English, German, and Italian with English subtitles
Roberto Rossellini followed up his paradigm-shifting Rome, Open City with this exceptionally ambitious anthology film set at the end of World War II, chronicling the liberation of Italy from a multitude of perspectives gathered from across the country. Marked by the documentary-infused directness of Rome, Open City, the film’s cast of professional actors and striking non-professionals enact a kaleidoscopic account of the extreme consequences of life during wartime, as well as the emerging relations between American soldiers on their liberation campaign and the Italian civilians they cross paths with. A crucial installment of his War Trilogy (alongside Rome, Open City and Germany Year Zero), Paisan endures as one of the great cinematic depictions of the effects of war on the lives of everyday people—and a signature work in Rossellini’s astonishing oeuvre.