Director: Ida Marie Gedbjerg Sørensen
Production: Tambo Film, Little Bus Production
Countries of production: Denmark, Hungary
Synopsis:
2158 Stories is an ode to cinema inspired by the discovery of a notebook, in which a manual worker has documented the 2158 cinema trips he made over the course of his life. Behind the orderly notebook is a split family with a shared passion for cinema. We follow four of the notebook owner’s descendants living in contemporary Hungary and discover how the only thing that unites them is their love for action movies. We hear their reflections on cinema, having always been an audience themselves. What is cinema, if something above and beyond an artform? A way to travel, to live out one’s fantasies, to forget the mundanity of everyday life. A way to keep a family together?
FIRST PITCH | Winner of Bio to B Prize at Versio 2022
Director: Raffaele Brunetti
Production: B&B Film
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
Exorcist and healer, singer and performer, Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo lived in the limelight,associating with three Popes and many TV celebrities, until at the age of 71 he married an acupuncturist he’d never met in a ceremony celebrated by Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon. He continued to defy the Church, consecrating bishops without the pope's permission. For these sins he was excommunicated in 2009. But who is Milingo really? A priest whose wedding made him a bizarre pop phenomenon? A ‘dangerous witch doctor’ who threatened a schism? A sincere advocate of cultural diversity and priests’ right to marry? Or a victim of racist prejudice in a Church run by whites?
FIRST PITCH | Tv Series
Original title: Maastopalo
Director: John Webster
Production: Yellow Film & TV
Country of production: Finland
Synopsis:
A Finnish ground firefighting force joins the EU Civil Protection Pool to fight climate change intensified forest fires now and in the future.
The training culminates in a one-month field operation in Portugal where they will join forces with the local emergency response teams during the fire season. It is here that our protagonists, and we the audience, come face to face with the very physical consequences of a warming planet.
Burnt earth is a film about climate change told on a human scale through engaging protagonists. The film highlights the importance of uniting across borders and cultures to combat the climate emergency that threatens us all.
FIRST PITCH
Director: Enrico Baraldi
Production: Dis.Film. S.r.l., Maxman Coop. Soc. Coop
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
Yulia and Natalia, two Ukrainian sisters, both actresses, arrived in Italy after the beginning of the war. One year after their arrival, they embark on a journey to visit their war-stricken country. Cinemas and theatres are now allowed to open, and they meet the people who chose to stay: actors, directors, young theatre students or simple spectators. These people are struggling with electricity, interruptions caused by alarms, the difficulty of keeping in touch with part of the staff who fled abroad and the absence of actors deployed on the front. But mostly, they are trying to answer a question: what is the point of doing theatre and acting in front of an audience, while a war is going on?
FIRST PITCH
Original title: Il Vangelo secondo Ciretta
Director: Caroline von der Tann
Production: Parallelo 41 Produzioni, Lucky Bird Pictures, Quilombo Films
Countries of production: Italy, Germany, France
Synopsis:
Ciretta, 21 years old, steals and prostitutes himself. At the same time, he is profoundly religious. There is no other place where spirituality and profanity, the imagined and the real, are so entangled as in the old center of Naples. During the pandemic months, lost in the streets of Naples, Ciretta is helped by the couple Perzechella and Capitano and hosted in the space they rent as a small theatre. For Ciretta this is a life changing experience and he decides to organize a big procession dedicated to the Madonna of sorrow he is so fond of. In Perzechella he sees the mother he never had and a true living Madonna. But then the new theater’s owner wants to turn it into a B&B. What will become of Ciretta now? And what of Napoli?
Original title: Tempesta Grauso
Director: Pietro Mereu
Production: Pietro Mereu
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
Nicola Grauso was one of the greatest Sardinian entrepreneurs, in the 90s with Video on line he had already understood the potential of the internet. His life and vision has always been over the top but great, if he was born in California maybe today he would be Bezos or Gates. In this moment of his life the greatest mission is to transfer his knowledge and knowledge to Elia his nephew and best friend.
FIRST PITCH | Looking for production | Tv Series
Original title: Il cinema che mai fu
Director: Marco Spagnoli
Production: The Piranesi Experience, Il Saggiatore, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
There is no great director in the hall of fame who does not have a shattered dream, a great film dreamt of and never realized: Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, Leone and many others. How could it happen that even important artists had to give up their great dream? Our story is the first chapter of a "cinematheque of broken dreams". A docufilm that recounts through unpublished sketches, archives and interviews all the reasons why a great film project can fail: from budget problems to the risk of being ahead of the times; from the art of knowing how to self-sabotage; to the inability to find the right interlocutors; from personal problems to the innate tendency not to know how to seize the moment.
FIRST PITCH
Director: Sonia Bergamasco
Production: Propaganda Italia, Quoiat
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
Eleonora Duse was and still is an icon. A unique talent who has left us with no records of her voice and presence. Pictures, fragments of gestures and movements, description of her acting, are the only “images” of her. Despite her absence, she’s has been a never-ending source of inspirations, her acting inspired both Lee Strasberg’s and Stanislavskij’s acting methods. To this day she remains an icon and example to actors, directors and artists alike, almost 100 years after her death. In first person actress Sonia Bergamasco leads a moving peer to peer investigation on Eleonora Duse, the greatest actress of all times, whose legacy revolutionized acting as we know it today.
FIRST PITCH
Original title: Il lato umano dell’impresa. Storia della Telettra e di Virgilio Floriani
Director: Monica Stambrini
Production: A Little Confidence
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
Virgilio Floriani came from a farming family of Northern Italy and studied as an engineer. In 1946, he founded Telettra, a small telecommunication company that in a few decades became an international frontrunner. Aiming to ensure a solid future to his company in Italy, in 1976 Floriani, now in his seventies, sold Telettra to Fiat. However, in 1990, right when it had achieved the primacy in HD satellite signal transmission with RAI, Telettra was sold to a French corporation. At the dawn of the telecommunications industry boom, Telettra died.
Floriani was my grandfather. Through public and family archival material, this film wishes to explore the story of a legacy that belongs both to my personal universe and Italian history.
FIRST PITCH
Director: Luigi D'Alife, Andrea Paco Mariani
Production: SMK Factory
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
1988, in the small town of Melpignano in South of Italy a historic event took place: for the first time some Soviet rock bands performed beyond the borders of USSR. The following spring, CCCP, Litfiba and other Italian rock bands performed in the Soviet Union. Through unpublished archival footage and interviews to the protagonists, we will unfold the incredible story of a musical tour that created a bridge between two worlds that were divided until then. A bridge made of a universal language that needs no interpreters: music.
FIRST PITCH
Original title: L’uomo che visse due volte. Storia dello scenografo Gino Pellegrini, dalla Via Emilia a Hollywood
Director: Fabio Donatini
Production: Bottega Finzioni Produzioni Srl
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
There are artists we do not know, even if we’ve all seen their work. When we look at the clouds that cover the Earth in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we don’t know that we are watching at the skillful hand of an Italian set designer. Nor could we: his name doesn’t appear anywhere in the credits.
Telling the story of Gino Pellegrini means talking about one of the many talented Italians that expatriated abroad, whose memory has been lost; it means telling the story of the migratory phenomena of the Second World War, of the life of many people who’ve pursued a dream elsewhere, in unknown lands, bringing back to Italy a spark of their experience, their adventures, their imagination beyond the illusions.
FIRST PITCH
Director: Giorgio Carella
Production: Graffiti doc, Tag Film
Countries of production: Italy, France
Synopsis:
Mafia, sorrow, escape, abandonment, exile, power, death, and blind love. His whole life long, Giorgio, a Milanese filmmaker, has wondered how the events that so radically upset his existence really went; how involved his parents had been in the family "clan" that had promoted the rise of Uncle Mimmo, a Mafia boss operating in Messina back in the 1980s; who really killed that uncle and why.
Pretending to shoot a film, Giorgio gets back to Sicily determined to discover the truth about the history of his family, hoping to patch together, with his parents and the rest of his relatives, the true story of Uncle Mimmo, and of the decisions and responsibilities of that period.
FIRST PITCH
My Turandot - Ai Weiwei and his Turandot
Original title: La mia Turandot - Ai Weiwei e la sua Turandot
Director: Maxim Derevianko
Production: Incipit Film, Khora Film
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
In 1920 Puccini wrote the first note of Turandot, that now is taken up by Ai Weiwei, one of the greatest contemporary artists, who choses to direct his first theatrical production at the Opera in Rome. Ai Weiwei feels that Turandot speaks of our time, so his production tackles both the Covid-19 epidemic, and the subsequent war between Russia and Ukraine, showing that Puccini's opera is still as vital and as relevant as ever. But Turandot story represents also Ai Weiwei life, as his life-long friend and choreographer Chiang Ching tells us.
FIRST PITCH
Original Title: il frutto del mio corpo
Director: Carlo Luglio
Production: Mompracem SRL
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
The docu-series chronicles the last three months of Marco Pannella's life and is based on his book “A Happy Freedom”, written with Matteo Angioli. Each episode will open with a "secular procession" of political, artistic and ecclesiastical figures who gathered to bid a final farewell to Pannella, told through Rai archival footage and audiovisual materials by Radio Radicale. Several issues will be addressed: Divorce; the legalization of soft drugs; the Negri, Tortora and Staller cases; the hunger strikes; the legalization of abortion, with emphasis on the country's political and sociocultural context from the early 1970s to the present.
FIRST PITCH
Original title: Il cassetto segreto
Director: Costanza Quatriglio
Production: Indyca Srl, Cinecittà, Rough Cat
Countries of production: Italy, Switzerland
Synopsis:
Sicily, the world, a home, a library. A sentimental and adventurous journey through an unknown 20th century, captured in 8mm reels, photographs, sound recordings, and documents from a unique archive, the collection of journalist and writer Giuseppe Quatriglio. The spark is the intense work carried out by his daughter, the award-winning director Costanza Quatriglio, in preparing for the definitive separation from her father's library, which was donated to the Sicilian Region. From the birth home, places steeped in stories unfold; personal and collective memory intertwine in a dense dialogue between the daughter and her ninety-year-old father, captured in unprecedented footage taken between 2010 and 2011 and preserved until today.
FIRST PITCH
Director: Valerio Valente
Production: Filmine
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
When in the early 90’s Jörg Metzner, a former East German citizen, got access to his STASI file, he learned that the story of his life was a script written and directed by STASI.
Jörg also found out that the disbanding, after only 3 years of activity, of his theater group “The Moles” was the result of a secret operation. Furthermore, he found out that two components of the group - one of his best friends, and his girlfriend at the time - were STASI informants and that both had spied on him.
The Secret Hand is a documentary about one of the most pervasive secret services in history, and how it controlled, infiltrated, repressed and manipulated artists in the former GDR.
FIRST PITCH
Original title: Questa non è Hollywood
Director: Fabio Luongo
Assistant director: Maria Adele Celli
Production: Zivago Film
Country of production: Italy
Synopsis:
At the end of the 1990s a group of young student, enrolled in the first national degree course in film history and criticism in Bologna, dragged an entire city into the dream of a low-budget, grassroots cinema. Thanks to the new digital cameras on the market and above all thanks to their ingenuity and ability to organize themselves into crews, they make an incalculable amount of video clips and short films, even films. Like Davide Sorlini, son of a butcher from Val di Scalve (Bs), who makes two films and like his hero Roger Corman produces a hundred short films at no cost, becoming the point of reference for dozens of aspiring directors. He dreamt that an alternative market to mainstream cinema could be created. But there is not only Davide - Corman, there are also Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro in the new Hollywood of Bologna: Giovanni La Parola talented director who shoots a real cult inspired by Raging Bull and Leo Mantovani an extravagant actor who becomes a fetish participating in all the works carried out at the time. But why did all those works never leave the walls of Bologna? And what happened to the protagonists of this movement? And why did their dream of changing the history of cinema never come true?
FIRST PITCH
Original title: Mio padre Toni
Director: Anna Negri
Production: MIR Cinematografica, Mediterranea Film
Countries of production: Italy, France
Synopsis:
Anna, a 50-year-old director of romantic films, confronts her 88-year-old father, Toni, an internationally renowned intellectual and philosopher who inspired the no-global movement, but also the number one public enemy in Italian politics during the country’s “Years of Lead”.
This dialogue recounts his life from a very intimate point of view. He covers the stages of Italian history seen from this exceptional perspective, resulting in a mélange of erudition, cultural sensitivity and political materialism. It is a unique opportunity both to take a closer look at that revolutionary fervour that defined parts of last century and to ask questions regarding the ethicality of the use of violence.
FIRST PITCH
Director: Emanuele Mengotti
Production: Harald House Belgium BV, Samarcanda Film
Countries of production: Belgium, Italy
Synopsis:
Trona, a small American town a few miles away from Death Valley that went from boom to bust in the nineties is now known for its desolation. Statistics paint a grim picture of abundant drug abuse and addiction. Still, the few kids born here try their best to pursue the American dream. Their childhood is as typical as it can be. Boys dream of becoming NFL stars and girls train to become cheerleaders. Conformity is their best bet on a future. Will they succeed or will the dark side of Trona drag them into the abyss?
Director: Anapì Stori
Production: Small Boss Production, Latteplus Berlin Film Production
Countries of production: Italy, Germany
Synopsis:
Each person in Europe releases into the atmosphere an average of 10 tons of CO2 per year. Roberto Costa is one of them. He is an average guy, who loves meat, traveling, watching online series and doesn´t exercise quite a lot. He will do a drastic experiment in order to pull down his carbon footprint to 0.6 tons of CO2 per year, which is the maximum that a person should release in order to stop climate change. Month after month he will change every aspect of his consuming behavior – food, clothes, use of internet, mobility – and we’ll see how his world changes in this drastic zero-emissions experiment. Is it something really doable?
