Biografilm Italia offers the best and most innovative of Italian documentary productions, an unexpected and multifaceted view of today's Italy and the world. Meet powerful, unique and universal stories through the gaze and sensibilities of these filmmakers.
The films and recorded talks with directors will be available to watch for free in their original languages with Italian subtitles for anyone who connects to the platform from within Italy.
Bianca is a 39-year-old transsexual woman. She’s been living in Milan since 2009 and works as a prostitute. For twenty years, she has been involved with Natasha, a Japanese trans who is temporarily living in Brazil. Their bond is very strong and distance has not weakened it. The film is about their love story, made up of long phone calls and even longer waits. Because of reasons related to work and family, they have not seen each other for two years. Bianca’s time without Natasha is marked by her clients, mostly regular ones, and by their requests. Over time, she has grown fond of them, but she always thinks about Natasha, who is finally coming back. The screening of this film is in collaboration with Cassero LGBTI Center.
During the Forties the young Pier Paolo Pasolini lived in Casarsa, a small town in Friuli and his mother’s birthplace. He discovers the Friulian landscape, language and traditions of the rural world and experiences his first romances with young peasant boys. This contact with local people prompted his political activism with the Italian Communist Party and led to his teaching experience. The story of those years is told by Nico Naldini, Pasolini’s direct cousin. The life of Pier Paolo runs through Nico’s voice, that unveils two unavoidably linked lifepaths. Both were, at the time, discovering an unknown world, of which they experienced the aesthetic and erotic violence, in its cruel reality. This universe would become the basis for the later poetry and movies of Pasolini.
Daniel, Simone and Desirée live in a no man’s land dominated by change and uncertainty, a space caught between being forgotten and not having quite come into being. They are in the eighth grade of the local district high school, in Via Colonna Rotta, at the heart of the Sicilian city of Palermo. The neighborhood is a cage, but at thirteen years old life is an adventure that begs to be navigated. Between school and work, first loves and family, the protagonists try and find their own road in life as they enter adolescence.
Francesca is living a very critical phase of her life. Her troubled relationship with food and a distorted perception of her body feed her insecurities and fears. To face such a hard moment, she decides to film herself and tell her story in an autobiographical film. So she starts on a difficult journey of discovery of herself and of the world around her, that brings her to discover and approach her mother’s child side, and to change her way to confront Dario, her illustrator boyfriend, who often uses his drawings to help her overcome her difficulties. The screening of this film is in collaboration with Associazione Orlando and Biblioteca Italiana delle Donne.
In the Italian region Calabria it’s the world’s most dangerous mafia organization that reigns: the ‘Ndrangheta. Here, a life of extorsion and murder is being passed on from father to son. In this documentary we follow juvenile judge Roberto Di Bella and four boys living in the shadow of mafia. Di Bella fights against the ‘Ndrangheta by taking young boys away far from the criminal environment which surrounds them and by re-educating them. Can one man change their fate?
Sqizo presents the story of Louis Wolfson, a Bronx-born writer whose extraordinary trajectory challenges all accepted definitions of mental health, language, and literature. Diagnosed schizophrenic as a teenager, he rejected his native English language and became an avid self-taught linguist in order to invent a new, personal idiom. While his first book instantly became a cult classic in 1970s Paris, he remained relatively unknown in the US, and ended up becoming homeless. The filmmaker discovered him in Puerto Rico where his luck had finally turned. Now 89 years old, Louis Wolfson still lives a solitary existence between the world of silence and the world of words.
The intimate dialogue between two fathers who trace back the last four years of the growth of their twins. They remember how their children coped with, in different ages, living in a family with two fathers, answering their companions' questions about the mother or playing on names and roles. Relive the strenuous battle of senator Monica Cirinnà to give Italy a law on civil unions. As they cultivate the affectionate relationship with the American families of the “dede” and the “dona” who allowed the birth of the children as they too participate in the celebration of the civil union of the couple. They seek, among different sensitivities, the names to be given to people of extended families created with assisted procreation techniques. The screening of this film is in collaboration with Cassero LGBTI Center.
In the American desert, there is a place near a bombing range, where the air and water are highly polluted. This place was forgotten by society, but it became the home for a group of people that decided to live away from the comfort in a lawless land in exchange for their freedom and their second chance in life.
