Content from Sicilia Film Commission

Franco scaldati - died in 2013 - was one of the most important autors of italian theatre plays, Maresco describes his role in the cultural and social field. Through his opera we can observe Italy from another point of view.

Based on the historical novel by Andrea Camilleri, The Vanishing of Patò is set in Vigàta, the town that Detective Montalbano fans know and love...but it's 1890, Easter weekend. Two rival investigators look into the disappearance of Antonio Patò, a quiet accountant who vanishes after his performance as Judas in the town's annual Passion Play.

The story of a judge against the mafia, Cesare Terranova. The first magistrate to have sensed the dangers of organized crime and to have instructed the first trials against Mafia bosses, when the word mafia was still spoken in a whisper. Terranova was killed on September 25, 1979 with his collaborator, Marshal Lenin Mancuso.

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.

Based on a true story, Italo vividly depicts the life-altering friendship between an extraordinary dog and a lonely child. One day, a good natured stray dog by the name of Italo, wanders into the small Sicilian town of Scicli. But Italo’s arrival causes a terrible uproar in the village, everyone there is fiercely opposed to having stray dogs around. Everyone… except Meno.

Four different stories tell how our lives have changed because of selfies, a craze that takes hold of all age groups and is experienced differently all over the world.

After a shipwreck, a Syrian girl arrives alone on a Sicilian island. A doctor sets out to find her origins and her mother.

100 years ago, a terrible earthquake, followed by an equally terrible tidal wave, devastated and largely destroyed Messina and Reggio Calabria.

Nothing - not her father, not the church - can stop unruly Angela from being with her childhood best friend turned great love, Sara. Based on a true story, Viola di Mare, presents a uniquely engaging portrait of family, community and gender roles in a 19th century Italian village.

Summer 1994. Berlusconi has come into power and 16-year-old Elena, listening to Nirvana and starting to develop a political consciousness, can't wait to bring him down. Unfortunately her parents have other plans and, like every year, they head to the same boring summer camp. This year however they're all in for a surprise...

Antonio and Agostino grew up together in a small town in Sicily; they dreamt of living a different life, somewhere else. Now thirty-year-olds, they both live abroad but they lost touch years ago. When Antonio discovers that the house he grew up in, which had been empty for a long time, is about to be sold at auction, he decides to leave and reconnects with his childhood friend. But their lives have changed a lot. Old conflicts and new revelations bring them through Europe on a truck journey.

Salvo, a Sicilian fisherman, is devastated by the tragic death at sea of his child during a bath at the "glass beach" and to escape the unbearable pain he leaves his village and goes to work far away as a offshore welder on an oil platform. When he receives news of his father’s stroke, he returns to Sicily to sell his father’s house with the idea of using the proceeds to obtain shared custody of his daughter in Calabria. But here his life will change again thanks to the activities of the catwalks that cross the Strait and the presence of people and unexpected affections, in the landscape of the coasts and villages of Messina and Villa San Giovanni.

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.

Francesco is a street boy who lives by his wits in Palermo. One day he accompanies a friend to the casting of an important film that will be shot in the city and so, almost by chance, he too finds himself taking part in the selections. In this circumstance, Francesco finds himself having to retrace the salient events of his life that made him the boy he is. The early loss of innocence due to a difficult childhood, marked by the drama of his mother's premature death and the harassment of an excessively authoritarian father, plunged him into the degraded context of street life. The subsequent encounters dragged him towards an impetuous and unruly adolescence, which led him first under the protection of social services and then to correctional institutions. Thanks to cinema, Francesco finds himself faced with the opportunity to completely change his life. Will he be able to seize it and redeem himself from an inexorable destiny, which seems to have already been written?

Inside a warehouse in Palermo, a group of people smashes a man’s arm to pieces with a wheelie bag packed with weights. This is the method used by an amateur criminal organization that fractures the limbs of its willing victims before staging fake accidents and raking in the insurance payouts. Vincenzo recruits the individuals from among the down-and-outs that haunt the city streets, where Luisa is a habitué, since she gets her crack there. Vincenzo’s problems suddenly get worse, though, after a series of mistakes shut him out of the gang, and Luisa is now his only chance: he convinces her to have her bones broken.

As in a long suite, the cinematographic story of a country, Italy, in its current physiognomy, in a film made only of images and music. A home atlas of wonders that are sometimes misunderstood and of places known, loved and often lost. And of people cultured in their living in a highly stratified territory, between the still usable grandeur of the past and the apparent stasis of the present. A country marked by strong inequalities and nevertheless in continuous transformation in the difficult race towards sustainable development, problematically suspended between the old and the new and the increasingly difficult search for a balance to safeguard its éthos.