Country:Italy

Director:Attilio Gatti

Program:The Lineage of Parallel Cinema

Summary:

In the annals of African cinema, Siliva the Zulu is a landmark. In 1927, Italian director and explorer Attilio Gatti traveled to Zululand along with famous anthropologist Lidio Cipriani, in order to create a film that would weave genuine anthropological elements into a fantasy of witchcraft and betrayal. He further developed his script with love, hate, intrigue and adventure. Gatti took a Western romantic theme of "boy meets girl, boy loses girl" and stirred it together with ideas of "the tribal," choosing his actors from among the local Zulu tribe members.

Country:Italy

Director:Dario Argento

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Dario Argento's thriller stars the director's daughter Asia as Anna Manni, a police woman trying to capture a vicious serial rapist and killer. The problem is that she suffers from ‘Stendhal’s syndrome’, a psychosomatic disease that gives her dizziness and hallucinations when she is exposed to the sight of paintings and artistic masterpieces. When the maniac lures her into a trap inside Florences' famous Uffizi museum, her troubles are just beginning... Argento puts his own highly perverse giallo spin on the dynamic relationship of fetishism, subjectivity and cinema.

Country:Italy

Director:Pier Paolo Pasolini

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

A devestating example of parallel narrativity in which two seemingly allegorical stories are told: In an undeterminated past, a young cannibal, having killed his own father, is condemned to be torn to pieces by some wild beasts while, in the second story, Julius, the young son of a post-war German industrialist, is on the way to lie down with his farm's pigs, because he doesn't like human relationships. This film was to mark Pasolini’s shift toward more brutal political subjects combined with a glacial detachment and eerie morbidity.

Country:Italy

Director:Federico Fellini

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Fellini held off his showdown with color film for quite some time until he developed a project that absolutely demanded it from him. The strange world of fantasy and memory that Juliet occupies is heavily indebted to the manner in which Fellini celebrates and manipulates color. Juliet lives in a beautiful house by the ocean. Her sisters, and especially her Mother overshadow her with their beauty.

Country:Italy

Director:Elisa Mishto

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

A nurse and three mental patients take turns playing the lead role in four stories told over four seasons moving through crisis, waiting, normalization, and adjustment. Their world within the rooms and hallways of the psychiatric clinic is at once brutally honest, tragic and poetic. Elements of their previous lives and of their current daily adventures are told with the lightness of a fairy tale, but without omitting the harshest and most melancholic aspects of their existence.