Edoardo De Angelis’ Comandante, a maritime thriller set in the early years of World War II, starring Pierfrancesco Favino as an Italian Royal Navy commander, will open the 23rd edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema.
Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà, the annual showcase of the Italian cinema, runs May 30 to June 6, 2024 in New York City.
Star-studded ensemble casts are featured in A Brighter Tomorrow, the latest from Nanni Moretti, who plays the lead alongside Margherita Buy, with memorable turns by Silvio Orlando and Mathieu Amalric; Ginevra Elkann’s I Told You So, with cast members Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Danny Huston; and Adagio, Stefano Sollima’s modern take on the noir genre with some of Italy’s best-known leading actors, including Pierfrancesco Favino, Valerio Mastandrea, Toni Servillo, and Adriano Giannini.
Open Roads presents the opportunity to discover new voices in Italian cinema including the debut titles from three of Italy’s gifted emerging filmmakers: the recent box office sensation There’s Still Tomorrow, Paola Cortellesi’s 1940s-set story of a battered woman who finds the courage to change her life; Alain Parroni’s electrifying An Endless Sunday, a stark, unblinking depiction of teenagers facing the bleakness of an uncertain future in Rome; and Tommaso Santambrogio’s stunningly photographed tale of exile in contemporary Cuba, Oceans Are the Real Continents.
This year’s program boasts a range of genres, including Enrico Maria Artale’s vividly traced neo-noir tragedy El Paraíso; Pietro Castellitto’s crime-thriller-social-satire Enea, which skewers hereditary privilege; Piero Messina’s Another End, a philosophical take on science fiction, contemplating a futuristic twist on the afterlife and its implications; and historical dramas like the WWII-set Lubo, the latest from Giorgio Diritti, featuring a magnetic performance by Franz Rogowski, and Laura Luchetti’s elegantly framed coming-of-age tale The Beautiful Summer.
Also featured is Roberta Torre’s Mi fanno male i capelli, a lovingly crafted homage to Monica Vitti worthy of the late muse of Michelangelo Antonioni, starring Alba Rohrwacher and featuring new original music by composer Shigeru Umebayashi.
FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films are in Italian with English subtitles unless otherwise noted, and will screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street).
Opening Night
Comandante
Edoardo De Angelis, 2023, Italy, 120m
Italian and Flemish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Edoardo De Angelis (The Vice of Hope, Open Roads 2019; Indivisible, Open Roads 2017) returns to FLC with his latest, a gripping maritime thriller driven by a powerhouse performance from Pierfrancesco Favino. Favino stars as Salvatore Todaro, the Italian Royal Navy officer in charge of the submarine Cappellini in the early years of World War II. After overcoming a shocking ambush on the Atlantic Ocean, Todaro and his men are confronted with a moral quandary: Should they rescue the men who just attacked them, or, as the Fascist authorities have ordered, leave those men to die? Comandante is a war film in the best sense, eschewing sensationalism and sentimentality in order to closely examine the courage of upholding one’s ethics in times of social rupture.
Adagio
Stefano Sollima, 2023, Italy, 127m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A young man finds himself lost in a labyrinth of criminality as Rome burns in Stefano Sollima’s latter-day take on the film noir. Sixteen-year-old Manuel (Gianmarco Franchini) infiltrates an exclusive, hedonistic party at the orders of a corrupt cop (Adriano Giannini), and he soon realizes he is a mere pawn in a complex blackmail plot. He then becomes embroiled with a trio of aging gangsters (Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, and Valerio Mastandrea), delving ever deeper into darkness while, in the background, Rome is beset by apocalyptic fires and blackouts. A suspenseful work suffused with twists, turns, and double crosses, Adagio is an eminently modern noir featuring magnetic performances from some of Italy’s greatest leading men.
Another End
Piero Messina, 2024, Italy/U.K./France, 129m
English and Spanish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A melancholic, philosophical take on science fiction, Piero Messina’s ensemble drama contemplates a futuristic twist on the afterlife and its implications for those whom the deceased have left behind. Gael García Bernal stars as Sal, who has recently lost his partner Zoe in a car accident. When Sal’s sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) suggests he use a new technology to transplant Zoe’s memories into the mind and body of a stranger (Renate Reinsve), he finds himself confronted with a new opportunity to say goodbye to his love—but at what price? A rare blend of high-concept and deep feeling, Another End is a moving work on human connection in an increasingly virtual world.
The Beautiful Summer / La bella estate
Laura Luchetti, 2023, Italy, 111m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Loosely adapted from a novel by Cesare Pavese, the latest from Laura Luchetti is a sensuously attuned portrait of female coming-of-age. Set in Turin in 1938, the film follows 17-year-old new-in-town dressmaker Ginia (Yile Yara Vianello) as she finds herself falling for artists’ model Amelia (Deva Cassel) and falling in with Amelia’s party-going cohort. She tries to make sense of her burgeoning attraction to Amelia, despite the disapproval of her older brother Severino (Nicolas Maupas). Sensitively staged and exquisitely shot, The Beautiful Summer lives up to its title, capturing the ecstasies and agonies of young love on the cusp of adulthood. A Film Movement release.
A Brighter Tomorrow / Il sol dell’avvenire
Nanni Moretti, 2023, Italy/France, 95m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The latest from Nanni Moretti is a comic sendup of the creative life and a love letter to cinema itself. Moretti stars as Giovanni, a film director who wishes to adapt John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” (the basis for Frank Perry’s 1968 Burt Lancaster–starring film of the same name). Sidetracked by working on a historical film about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, his producer wife Paola (Margherita Buy) is hired to work on another project, stirring Giovanni’s resentment that she isn’t idly waiting around to help him make his dream film. Also featuring memorable turns by Silvio Orlando and Mathieu Amalric, A Brighter Tomorrow is a funny, self-reflexive work on the monomania of artists and its effects on the people in their lives.
An Endless Sunday / Una sterminata domenica
Alain Parroni, 2023, Italy/Germany, 115m
Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Alain Parroni’s kinetic debut feature follows three teenagers on the cusp of adulthood and on the brink of nihilism in and around Rome. Alex (Enrico Bassetti), Brenda (Federica Valentini), and Kevin (Zackari Delmas) are close friends living on the outskirts of Rome, caught between the ancient city’s feeling of eternity, the terrible bleakness of an uncertain future, and their own horror at the prospect of aging. A compassionate yet unsentimental chronicle of the trio’s daily travails, An Endless Sunday is a spiritual descendant of Kids and The Doom Generation, and accordingly Parroni lovingly depicts his young characters as sympathetic personifications of things to come.
Enea
Pietro Castellitto, 2024, Italy, 115m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Hereditary privilege gets skewered in Pietro Castellitto’s sophomore feature, which he also wrote and stars in. Enea (Pietro Castellitto) is the good-for-nothing son of a television personality (Chiara Noschese) and a therapist (Sergio Castellitto) whose casual forays into drug-dealing—presented as being, for Enea, no different than any number of idle pursuits for the rich and bored—begin to intensify when a Roman crime lord taps him to help with a large cocaine shipment. Blending stylishly rendered social satire with elements of the crime film, Enea is a seductive and aesthetically refined critique of the one percent at their most out-of-touch.
I Told You So / Te l’avevo detto
Ginevra Elkann, 2023, Italy, 100m
English and Italian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
An apocalyptic January heat wave in Rome induces a state of collective delirium in Ginevra Elkann’s second feature, an ensemble piece that follows a constellation of Romans on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Boasting a star-studded cast—including Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Valeria Golino, Alba Rohrwacher, Riccardo Scamarcio, Danny Huston, and more—I Told You So turbulently dances from character to character, capturing this intertwined group as their personal issues and existential fears threaten to boil over against a sophisticatedly surreal backdrop.
Lubo
Giorgio Diritti, 2023, Italy/Switzerland, 175m
Italian and German with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Adapted from Mario Cavatore’s 2004 novel Il seminatore, the latest from Giorgio Diritti stars Franz Rogowski as Lubo Moser, an itinerant artist of Yenish descent who, in 1939, is conscripted by the Swiss Army to help defend its border as World War II looms in the near future. He finds out that, in his absence, his children have been arrested as part of a eugenics-influenced national reeducation program, so he sets out to find his children and, if necessary, avenge them. Based on the real-life scandalous “Kinder der Landstrasse” program in Switzerland, Lubo is both an indignant historical examination of this terrible phenomenon and a twisting-and-turning revenge parable rooted in Rogowski’s magnetic performance. A Shadow Distribution release.
Mi fanno male i capelli
Roberta Torre, 2023, Italy, 83m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Roberta Torre’s ninth feature isn’t so much a Monica Vitti biopic as a lovingly crafted homage worthy of the late muse of Michelangelo Antonioni. Alba Rohrwacher stars as Monica, an amnesiac woman who reconstructs and reimagines her own identity as refracted through Vitti’s unforgettable performances in such films as L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, and Red Desert. As Monica settles into this new form of self, the boundaries between reality and fantasy grow ever more porous. An atmospheric and cinephilic work on the construction of identity and the marks left upon us by great films, Mi fanno male i capelli also features new original music by composer (and frequent Wong Kar Wai collaborator) Shigeru Umebayashi.
Oceans Are the Real Continents
Tommaso Santambrogio, 2023, Italy/Cuba, 119m
Spanish with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Tommaso Santambrogio’s debut feature is a stunningly photographed black-and-white portrait of contemporary Cuba, capturing three disparate tales of exile with an outsider’s gaze. Each of its constituent stories deals with Cubans planning to leave the country, yearning to leave the country, or affected by someone else’s decision to leave the country, conveying a sense of life in the island nation as always caught between here and there, those who are gone and those who remain. Strikingly and precisely lensed by Lorenzo Casadio Vannucci and performed by a remarkable cast of non-professional actors, Oceans Are the Real Continents is a disarmingly beautiful and moving film about the complex realities of life in Cuba today. A Film Movement release.
El Paraíso
Enrico Maria Artale, 2023, Italy, 106m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A film about a mother-son relationship with a neo-noir twist, Enrico Maria Artale’s fourth feature stars Edoardo Pesce as Julio Cesar, a fortysomething crook who lives with his Colombian mother (Margarita Rosa de Francisco). Living on the margins, the two share everything—including income from a local drug dealer. But their familial harmony is disturbed by the arrival of a young Colombian drug mule, leading to a contentious new state of affairs for the pair. A vividly traced tragedy powered by the remarkable performances of its dual leads, El Paraíso is a transfixing drama that stress-tests the ties that bind to meditate upon the status of love in a world ruled by violence.
There’s Still Tomorrow / C’è ancora domani
Paola Cortellesi, 2023, Italy, 118m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A box office sensation upon its theatrical release in Italy, comedian Paola Cortellesi’s black-and-white directorial debut finally comes to New York at this year’s Open Roads. Set in the 1940s, the film stars Cortellesi as Delia, a working-class mother who is a victim of domestic physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her military veteran husband (Valerio Mastandrea). Delia suffers in silence while going about her daily routine, but a mysterious letter arrives giving her the courage at last to change the circumstances of her life. An astounding film that is as empowering as it is humorous, There’s Still Tomorrow movingly depicts the plight and grace of, in the director’s own words, “the many ordinary women who have built, unsuspectingly, our country.”