The Cinema Made in Italy program promotes and distributes contemporary Italian films to theaters in the United States, insuring that the best of Italian cinema is always available to fans, no matter where they live in the country. The series is an initiative sponsored by Cinecittà and is managed by Deutchman Company Inc, which handles the marketing and distribution of the films. In previous years, the initiative has released or supported such films as Paolo Sorrentino’s Academy Award winning Best Foreign Language Film,“The Great Beauty,” Valeria Golino’s “Honey,” Marco Bellochio’s “Dormant Beauty,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Me and You,” Nanni Moretti’s “Mia Madre” and Gianfranco Rosi’s Academy Award nominated Best Documentary, “Fire at Sea” among others.
Pet shop owners by day and swingers by night, Italian couple Hermes and Betta are, in most ways, regular people. In this honest, sex-positive look at the swinger lifestyle, director and cinematographer Mauro Russo Rouge is invited into their lives with no moment off-limits, crafting a portrait of a relationship that gives equal weight to the mundane yet strangely fascinating logistics of organizing sex parties as it does to the act itself.
Shot in a rich visual style that is deeply sensual without ever feeling vulgar or exploitative, the film is an intimate exploration of the deep love and complex challenges one polyamorous couple shares.
“A sweet documentary portrait of two people testing the limits of sexual desire.” –Chicago Reader
“An exciting and intriguing film about the world of swingers.” –Le Petit Septieme
IN THEATERS
August 12, 2022
Quad Cinema – New York City
August 19, 2022
Laemmle Noho – Los Angeles
Marx Can Wait
“MARX CAN WAIT” a film by Marco Bellocchio
In his most achingly personal film to date, legendary Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio uses the occasion of a family reunion in his hometown of Piacenza to excavate and discuss a traumatic event: the death his twin brother Camillo, who committed suicide in the late ’60s at age 29. Through detailed conversations with his siblings, archival footage providing context about 20th-century Italian leftist politics, and occasional clips from his films, many of which were in some way imbued with this defining family tragedy, Bellocchio conducts a personal and historical exorcism. Reckoning with the push-pull the director has long felt between the twin poles of family and politics, Marx Can Wait is an attempt at reconciliation and understanding from a filmmaker in his eighties whose work has never shied away from the challenging or the provocative.
(from the New York Film Festival Program)
Honorary Palme d’Or to Marco Bellocchio
2021 Cannes Film Festival
“A wrenching and tender film that will be essential viewing for Bellocchio fans…illuminating the legacy of a difficult and fascinating family.” –The New York Times
“Marx Can Wait is a crucial and profound addition to the filmography of one of the greatest living filmmakers, and it ends with a loving reconciliation with the past that is so moving and so convincing because it is so hard-won. This is a movie that has a rare kind of final cathartic authority.” –The Wrap
“Straightforward in concept yet psychologically profound…a frank and revealing documentary” –Variety
“No film I saw during the 11 days at Cannes affected me as much as this documentary by celebrated Italian director Marco Bellocchio. “ –Chicago Reader
Winner of the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight Award and a rising voice of Italian cinema, filmmaker Jonas Carpignano continues his exploration of the intricacies of life in contemporary Calabria with this compelling character study of a teenager, Chiara, who gradually comes to discover that her close-knit family is not all that it seems. In this furiously paced drama, Chiara investigates her father’s disappearance just one day after her oldest sister’s birthday. As she gets closer to the difficult truth about her mysteriously missing father—and the crime syndicates that control her region— Chiara is forced to decide what kind of future she wants for herself. A coming-of-age chronicle like no other, A CHIARA is both an intimate and universal family story.
Director’s Fortnight, Cannes 2021
New York Film Festival 2021
Nominated for 3 Independent Spirit Awards
“Instantly engaging. A Chiara lifts the director’s scrappy neo-neorealism to another level, showing him increasingly in command of the medium and physically entrenched in the milieu he continues to explore in fascinating detail. His most accomplished, polished and affecting film to date though it still maintains enough grittiness and rough edges to fit the material. Again coaxing impeccably unselfconscious performances out of nonprofessional actors… There’s a new urgency to the drama once it kicks in, a more haunting intimacy that comes in no small part from the churning depths of Rotolo’s central performance. A shattering climax.” –David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
“BLOOM UP”
“MARX CAN WAIT”
A CHIARA
