Sometimes even telling the genesis of a work of art becomes a work of art in itself. This is why the Art & Music section thrills us every year—because it is a meeting of sensibilities, of artists who open up to talk about their inner worlds, their private lives, their struggles and their fight for expression, everything that revolves around their world, including the beautiful, the ugly, and the bad. This medley of voices, sounds, and images hugely amplifies our love for the creative process and for those who continue to walk through this world every day with the dreamy gaze of an artist.
Italian Premiere
(Doc / UK, Ireland / 2024 / 98')
In the 1960s, Irish author Edna O'Brien published her debut novel, The Country Girls, causing scandal with its sexually explicit content. She became a literary icon, writing articles for The New Yorker, giving provocative interviews, and writing screenplays. Her success angered her husband and made her a pariah in Ireland, where her books were banned. She settled in London, had numerous love affairs, hosted star-studded parties, made and lost a fortune. This fascinating, candid, and dark film—much like her novels—offers a final testimony of Edna, at the age of 93, reflecting on her extraordinary life.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy, Ukraine / 2025 / 73')
Yulia and Natalia, two actresses from Kyiv, Ukraine, are currently living as refugees in Bologna, Italy. A year after their arrival, the two young actresses decide to embark on a journey back to their country, where cinemas and theatres have now reopened, suffering the hardships caused by the war such as the lack of electricity, interruptions due to alarms, and the absence of many actors and actresses, engaged at the front. Dear Audience is a documentary about art in wartime, and the effects of conflicts on the lives of ordinary people engaged in a daily resistance to continue telling stories.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 72')
In the earthquake-stricken areas of Emilia, a musician searches for abandoned objects in recycling centers and transforms them into musical instruments, giving life to the Rulli Frulli Band: a group of boys and girls of all colors, genders, and abilities who light up stages across Italy. Not just a band, but also a model of inclusion being studied by the Università Cattolica. This film tells their extraordinary adventure of music, hope, and rebirth, a true story that moves and inspires. A powerful testimony to how even what seems broken can start playing again.
International Premiere
(Doc / Netherlands / 2024 / 66')
Karin Junger investigates the impact of cancel culture on artistic freedom. Heavily criticized for her 2017 documentary about young black people in the Netherlands, in which she filmed her children with their friends, she began to wonder who decides what artists can express. In this new film, the director explores how an artist's gender or color determines what they are “allowed” to create and discusses with other artists the rise of the phenomenon of “cancel culture” and its impact on artistic freedom. A timely reflection that sparks debate on art, identity, and freedom of expression.
Italian Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Fiction / Ireland / 2025 / 84')
An Irish geologist living in Italy gets an unexpected call from Berlin: her father, whom she hasn't been in contact with for over 30 years, is unconscious after a severe fall. She is asked to go to the German capital. Over the course of a night in her father's Berlin apartment she leafs through some diaries. She learns about a trip he took in the early 2000s to research fascist-era buildings and sculptures, that ended in tragedy. Latina, Latina is a hybrid between documentary and fiction that uses an elegant and dreamy lens. Touching and timely, it explores a political ideology through the objects and buildings it left behind.
Italian Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Netherlands / 2024 / 82')
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, the iconic face of Blade Runner, from which this quote is taken, has earned his place in cinema history. His granddaughter, Sanna Fabery de Jonge, delves into Hauer's personal archive to tell the story of the man behind the legend. Hauer documented his entire life: previously unseen family footage shot on boats, in campers, and on sets reveal his deep love for his wife and friends. Through the testimonies of family and colleagues, including Whoopi Goldberg and Mickey Rourke, a touching portrait of a charismatic man emerges.
(Doc / Italy / 2024 / 74')
Livio Garzanti. A difficult and moody man, obsessed with death, loved and feared. He was also a brilliant and highly cultured publisher, capable of reconciling the refined and scandalous authors he discovered and launched—Pasolini, Parise, Gadda—with literary entertainment and cultural dissemination of the highest quality, which he saw as his life's mission. Toni Servillo recounts the two worlds, the publisher’s and the private, which constantly intertwine in the choices and ideas of an intellectual who hated rhetoric and cultural snobbery, always preferring surprise, provocation, and the truth, even if disturbing.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 70')
In 2008, Le Macabre, a small Italian CBGB's, closed its doors. Like the famous New York club, it was a hub for rock music in the 1980s and 1990s, but was located in Bra, in the sleepy Italian province. Diaframma, Marlene Kuntz, Vinicio Capossela, Nico, C.C.C.P., and many others performed on its stage. Through its protagonists, the film tells the story of the birth of a music movement that wanted to shake off the myth of singer-songwriting. It is the story of the Busso family who created and ran it, but also that of a generation that found an identity in music.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 77')
The documentary traces the key stages in the career of Milanese director and actor Maurizio Nichetti, following his return behind the camera with his recent film AmicheMai, his first after twenty years without directing. Through archive material, clips from his films, and personal accounts, the film tells the story of an artist capable of revolutionizing the language of cinema with irony, innovative techniques, and a touch of surrealism. A journey into the heart of a visionary, poetic and unmistakable cinema, between fairy tale, reality and experimentation.
Italian Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Belgium, Iceland / 2024 / 73')
We enter the visual and material world of Sophie Cauvin, a Belgian painter who has been collecting for over thirty years stones and earth from landscapes transformed by time and man. Directed by French-Iranian filmmaker Mojtaba Bahadori, the documentary reveals the artist's creative process, deeply connected to the earth: each fragment collected tells a story of the planet, an echo of places separated by borders and history. The film stands out for its visual beauty, the evocative power of its images, and its sincere attention to the environment. A hypnotic experience that restores dignity to matter and landscape, celebrating art as a form of resistance and recomposition.
World Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 74')
As a boy, the director was sure that his uncle Massimo and his favorite singer, Lucio Dalla looked alike. In fact, they were the same person–both complicated, remarkable, different. Today, in the film, Francesco Frisari explores that impossible similarity, which helped him understand his uncle’s disability. As he observes his daily life, his games and obsessions, Lucio Dalla comes back, speaking and singing of loneliness, anger, confinement, and freedom. In this game of mirrors, the director is brought to face himself, his struggles, and his own similarity to uncle Massimo.
Italian Premiere
(Doc / Denmark / 2025 / 81')
A Danish museum gives 530,000 kroner to an artist to produce a work physically displaying the annual income of a worker. But he has a different idea: he delivers two empty frames and calls the work “Take The Money and Run”. It is a provocation against the precarious conditions of artists. The gesture becomes viral around the world and divides public opinion. The museum wants their money back, but the artist refuses: returning it, he says, would mean destroying the work. An ironic portrait of an unpredictable man who rewrites the rules of art: is he a crazy con artist or a genius?
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 59')
Five extraordinary women of our time tell about their bold femininity. From writer Dacia Maraini to Emma Bonino, politician and civil rights activist; from Sussan Deyhim, Iranian composer and singer in exile, to Tomaso Binga, a verbovisual artist who uses her body to challenge male power, to Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, Japanese painter and sculptor, wife of the painter Balthus. At the heart of the story are women and their bodies, catalysts of events and memory. The lives of these resilient women, balancing passion and resistance, are an immortal gift to the sisters of yesterday and tomorrow.
