Content from Dugong Films

The year is 1764. For over a year, Josef has been leading a precarious life in Venice. He hopes to become an opera composer. The city, full of talented and already-established composers, seems closed to him. Looking for work as a violinist, he comes into the orbit of a rich young woman. Thanks to her, he gets the opportunity to play at salons. But his real opportunity arises when he becomes the lover of a libertine marquise. She teaches him worldly manners, rids him of signs of a provincial upbringing and introduces him to a hedonistic existence free from religious intolerance. Thus transformed, Josef gets an incan incredible commission: to write an opera for the San Carlo, Europe's largest theatre.

After a painful journey through Europe, Aleksei, a Belarusian, joins the Foreign Legion in France and clings to a confused hope of a European identity. Jomo, a Nigerian, fights for the survival and durability of his people in the Niger Delta and is ready to die to defend his ideas. These two young people who are sacrificed and smashed together will, against all odds, meet and their destinies will merge to continue across borders, bodies, life and death...

The story revolves around an actress who is going to shoot her latest film in Rome in the 1980s.

Christopher Clark was an eco-warrior, a remarkable Scotsman who created his own personal Outpost of progress in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest. It was the model for a utopian society based on the perfect balance between nature and technology, protected and run by the inhabitants of the forest. Unfortunately, the situation got worse year by year, and in the film, a new huge wildfire now threatens to destroy the Outpost. Chris takes a gamble and decides to pit an equally spectacular event against the destruction of the forest: a Pink Floyd concert inside the green inferno, as a way to convince the Brazilian government to set up a nature reserve. To a dreamer like him, anything is possible, and he may well be right: in a world careening towards the apocalypse, being a bit crazy is the only form of resistance there is. But can we really save the rainforest? We, the children of the same capitalist system that is destroying it?

A small film crew is wandering about Marrakesh and the surrounding desert. They are looking for locations for the remake of an American film in which a man swims his way home, passing through the houses and pools that he finds along the route. Corrado is the stand in used to test the shots, locations and the swimming pools in which the lead will be filmed. While we watch his attempts to get into the part, the real actors and a real crew burst onto the scene, on a set in which no one is in the right place. A film with a crisis of identity, in a surreal search for itself.

When a suburban couple goes camping for the weekend at a remote beach, they discover that nature isn't in an accommodating mood.

Alternating archive footage of Anita Ekberg with the story of a quintessential diva as Monica Bellucci who is offered the chance to play Anita in a movie, digging through this woman’s story, she retraces her exceptional life, frailties and chooses, reflecting on what it feels like to be an icon. What key decisions a contemporary diva faces in order not to fall into oblivion?

Filming on Franco Maresco's film about Carmelo Bene is abruptly halted after yet another on-set accident. Producer Andrea Occhipinti pulls the plug, exasperated by the endless takes and repeated delays. Angered, the director simply disappears. Maresco's friend, Umberto Cantone, attempts to mend the rift by calling witnesses from all those involved in the project, in an investigation that offers an opportunity to retrace the personality and ideas of the most corrosive and apocalyptic auteur in Italian cinema.

Dissident artist Hu Jie has managed to make more than 30 documentaries. Films like Though I Am Gone and Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul are vital to understanding Chinese history and society. Widely recognized as the first artist to dare talk about the Great Famine, the labor camps, and the Cultural Revolution, Hu Jie is considered China's first historical documentary filmmakers.

Fouad, a Moroccan clandestine living in Italy for years awaiting medical treatment, and Daniela, a former drug-addict from Apulia’s upper middle-class, find each other by chance in Umbria. The meeting is the beginning of a special bond that helps them heal, both claiming without any hesitation, they saved each other’s life. But Fouad’s feeling of not belonging and the interminable waiting for a visa are pushing him to the brink: will he stay in Umbria or go back to Casablanca, even if it means never to return?

In the heart of Rome, face to Saint Peter’s, stands a Palace. The owner, like a renaissance patron, has once been offering shelter to a bizarre group of friends, embracing their joyfully ambitious causes. The perfect hideout from where to pursue the most aleatory artistic projects, far from the hassles of life. Now in their 50s’, they are suddenly reunited by the premature death of their charismatic leader, Mauro. He left something tangible to the group of friends: hours of footage where he directed them in the most diverse roles, a supposed masterpiece that was never finished, and now a a mirror reflecting images from the past. The mourning, in the shudder of a moment, shakes the numbed spirits, leading them into a radical confrontation with their future.

Daniele is a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island on the edges of the Venice Lagoon. He lives on his wits, isolated even from his peer group who are busy exploring an existence of pleasure-seeking expressed in the cult of the barchino (motorboat). This obsession focuses on the building of ever more powerful engines to transform the little lagoon launches into dangerously fast racing boats. Daniele too dreams of a record-breaking barchino, one that will take him to the top of the leader board, but everything he does to further his dream and win respect from the others turns out to be tragically counterproductive. The decline that erodes the relationships, environment and habits of a rootless generation is observed from the timeless perspective of the Venetian landscape and its island outskirts: the point of no return is a foolish, vestigial tale of male initiation. Violent and destined to fail, it explodes dragging the ghost city along on a psychedelic shipwreck.

Inspired by real life events, Madame Luna tells the story of an Eritrean refugee who is washed ashore in Libya and survives to become one of the most notorious human smugglers, with deep ties to the Italian Mafia. Now trapped in Italy and forced to experience the brutalising reality endured by the people she has exploited in the past, Madame Luna must try to find a way out before she is recognized and brought to justice. In the process she forms a powerful bond with a younger version of herself.

With Spy, filmmaker Yuri Ancarani proposes an oneiric journey inside “Breath Ghosts Blind,” an exhibition by Maurizio Cattelan at Pirelli HangarBicocca, curated by Roberta Tenconi and Vicente Todolí, conceived as a reflection in three acts on the human existence and the cycle of life with all its contradictions and frailties. The narration, seen through the eyes of an unusual visitor—whose fugitive identity is revealed only towards the end of the video—unfolds as a nonlinear sequence, with a disorienting editing and mesmerizing juxtapositions of image frames of the three works of art on display.

The Albanian regime collapses while private television stations multiply in Italy, marking the dawn of a new ruling class. Ana and Marko, Albanians, in the labyrinth of Milan in the 1990s.

Gian, a 65-year-old ethnomusicology professor, fights the darkness caused by the sudden onset of amnesia. Flashes of the past, that blend with hazy archive footage, haunt his mind like a phantasmagoria of images. Despairing, Gian tries to end things, but he fails. In the aftermath, Miriam, the daughter he does not recognize, moves into his apartment with her son Elyas. She helps him find a diary written into his twenties that revolves around Leila, a girl with whom he discovers love in the space of one night. This emotion exacerbates Gian’s pain but pushes him to recover his memory.