Il Ponte che non c'è (2024)

Rummaging for Pasts

Rummaging for Pasts is an experimental juxtaposition of two cinematic documents: the video diary of an international archaeological excavation and a collection of assorted eight millimeter found footage of Indian weddings.

Profumo di Zagara

The life of Giuseppe, Maria, and their friends growing up in the charming Sicilian village of Villabate, which evolves over generations.

Sòne:

Daniel Kemény returns twenty years later to the place of his childhood, the village of Pietrapaola in Calabria. In search of lost time, the filmmaker collects musical accounts, brings together their protagonists and gives these memories a new life, thus playing the generous transmitter who helps keep alive the oral history of a world whose popular traditions are dying off.

Stories from Sicily

A documentary about the life of the filmmaker’s grandfather and his life growing up in Fascist Italy to meeting his wife and immigrating to America.

I Want Her Dead

An unhappy family in a remote village in Calabria: Luisa is at war with the world since day one. She is juggling odd jobs, her love for her children and granddaughter, and her feuding with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law. While the two women exchange insults and call in the cops, three elderly aunts, a tragicomic chorus, try in vain to keep the peace.

House of the Wickedest Man in the World

House of the Wickedest Man in the World is the story of a ruined building near the city of Cefalú in Sicily. In the early 1920s, Aleister Crowley, the most famous occultist of his time, lived in the building, practicing magical rituals. In the summer of 1955, Kenneth Anger, considered one of the pioneers of experimental cinema, traveled with sexologist Alfred Kinsey to Sicily to find Aleister Crowley’s temple to shoot a film about the occultist’s time in Cefalú. The Thelema Abbey film was never released.

My Body

Oscar, not quite a child anymore, scavenges for scrap metal for his father. He spends his life in improvised landfills among what remains of leftovers. Worlds apart, yet close-by, there is Stanley. He tidies the church in exchange for a monetised hospitality, picks fruits, herds sheep: anything that keep his foreign body busy. Oscar, the young Sicilian, and Stanley the Nigerian don’t seem to have much in common. Except for the feeling of being thrown into the world, to suffer the same refusal, the same overwhelming wave of choices imposed on them by others.

Méditerranée : la face immergée des volcans

With the help of diver and biologist Laurent Ballesta, a scientific expedition explores three sunken Italian volcanic sites in the Mediterranean.

Trap Diary

From the book by the same name by Ninni Ravazza, "Diario di Tonnara" tells the story of the towns, villages, communities and adventures that dictate the daily lives of the tuna fishermen in Italy.

Bayesian : les mystères du naufrage du superyacht en sicile

Plot unavailable

Raccolta del pistacchio di Bronte D.O.P.

Plot unavailable

Excellent Cadavers

In the late-80s and early-90s, two prosecutors went after the mob in Sicily. Archival footage, gruesome photographs and new interviews are shown.

Lux Santa

The millennia-old myth and tradition of St. Lucy's fire told through the eyes of teenagers on the shores of the Ionian Sea.

Sea Countrymen

Sicily, Granitola, 1955. At the first light of dawn, the fishermen set out in their boats for open water, timing the rhythm of their oars to murmured chants. They set their nets in the sea, regulate the cords, organize the boats in a square. The men’s work becomes increasingly harder as the tuna are hoisted onto the boats, wriggling, beating their tails until death arrives and the water is tinged with blood.

Operation Mincemeat

Documentary detailing the successful Operation Mincemeat in 1943, which led to the Allies successfully invading Sicily and the war turning in their favour.

The Polizzi Project

When Australian artist Eolo Bottaro revives the lost Triform Goddess Isis, Polizzi's forgotten history revives. This gripping documentary captures the statue's creation, the town's awe, and the artist's unexpected bond with the Sicilian town.

Gli agnelli possono pascolare in pace

A Sicilian janitor gets visited by a Madonna statue in his dreams, telling him that she is buried under an olive tree and asking him to help getting her out of the earth.

The Big Blue

Childhood friends Jacques and Enzo share a passion for the danger of free diving. Professional diver Jacques opted to follow in the footsteps of his father, who died at sea when Jacques was a boy; to the bewilderment of scientists, Jacques harbors a remarkable ability to adjust his heart rate and breathing pattern in the water, so that his vital signs more closely resemble that of dolphins than men. As Enzo persuades a reluctant Jacques to compete against him in a free diving contest -- determining who can dive deeper and longer without scuba gear -- Jacques meets Johana, a beautiful American insurance investigator, and finds that he must choose between his love for her and his love of the sea.

Golden Door

The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.

Moonstruck

37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.

The Sicilian

Egocentric bandit Salvatore Giuliano fights the Church, the Mafia, and the landed gentry while leading a populist movement for Sicilian independence.

Fireworks

The troubled relationship between Gianni and Nino, set in the narrow-minded and prejudicial Sicily of 1982.

20 Million Miles to Earth

When the first manned flight to Venus returns to Earth, the rocket crash-lands in the Mediterranean near a small Italian fishing village. The locals manage to save one of the astronauts Colonel Calder, the mission commander. A young boy also recovers what turns out to be a specimen of an alien creature. Growing at a fantastic rate, it manages to escape and eventually threatens the city of Rome.

Malena

During WWII, a teenage boy discovering himself becomes love-stricken by Malèna, a sensual woman living in a small, narrow-minded Italian town.

Johnny Stecchino

Good hearted but not very wordly-wise, Dante is happy driving the school bus for a group of mentally handicapped children, while feeling he is somehow missing out on life and love. So he is very excited when after nearly being knocked down by her car he meets Maria, who seems immediately enamoured of him. He is soon invited to her sumptuous Palermo villa, little suspecting that this is part of a plot. He bears an amazing likeness to Maria's stool-pigeon gangster husband and it would be convenient for them if the mobster, in the shape of Dante, was seen to be dead and buried.

Jane Austen's Mafia!

After growing up poor in Salmonella, Vincenzo Cortino installs himself as the preeminent, if bumbling, Mafia don of the New World. But now he must pass on power to one of his two sons: either level-headed veteran Anthony or vituperative loose cannon Joey.

The Best of Youth

After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lifepaths of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family diverge, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.

Divorce Italian Style

Ferdinando Cefalù is desperate to marry his cousin, Angela, but he is married to Rosalia and divorce is illegal in Italy. To get around the law, he tries to trick his wife into having an affair so he can catch her and murder her, as he knows he would be given a light sentence for killing an adulterous woman. He persuades a painter to lure his wife into an affair, but Rosalia proves to be more faithful than he expected.

Le inibizioni del dottor Gaudenzi, vedovo col complesso della buonanima

Doctor Gaudenzi, a real Sicilian manly man living in Rome, Italy, married the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. One day, his wife is about to die, and being very religious, she asks for a cardinal to perform the last rites and further demands that her husband pledges not to marry or be with other women after she dies. Constrained by the cardinal's presence, Gaudenzi promises, and she promptly dies. Later, as soon as he is about to fall in temptation when looking at sexy girls, strange things happen, finally convincing him that his jealous wife is watching from "out there". Gaudenzi decides to give up on his lusty life: he's returning to his Sicily home and, to be on the sure side, he asks to be injected with female hormones. That's when he meets a sexy woman no man can resist...

Stiletto

A rich, jet-setting playboy has a secret life: he's also a professional Mafia hitman. When he decides it's time to retire from that life, he finds that his former employers don't like the idea that someone who knows so much about them won't be under their control anymore, and decide to send their own hitmen to eliminate him.

Adventures of Casanova

Casanova, a young patriot in 18th-century Sicily, upon learning that his father and sister have been murdered, returns to Palermo and engages in guerilla tactics against the forces of the Governor. Lady Bianca, the Governor's daughter, is in love with one of the patriots, Lorenzo, and desires to escape from the palace. Her lady-in-waiting, Zanetta, enlists the aid of Casanova and he rescues them and takes them to the partisan's camp. The rebels are victorious. Lady Bianca makes plans to marry Lorenzo, and Casanova and Zanetta have similar plans.

Operation Mincemeat

In 1943, two British intelligence officers concoct Operation Mincemeat, wherein their plan to drop a corpse with false papers off the coast of Spain would fool Nazi spies into believing the Allied forces were planning to attack by way of Greece rather than Sicily.

Operation Snafu

World War II soldiers enter Sicily to seize German arms supply only to discover there is not a gun in sight.

Paisan

Six stories unfold in various regions, from Sicily to the northern Po Valley as American military personnel interact with a variety of Italian locals over eighteen months in the push north during the Italian Campaign of WWII as German forces retreat.

The Big Red One

A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.

I Vicerè

In late 19th-century Sicily, the noble Uzeda family—whose lineage dates back to the ancient viceroys that ruled those lands—fights to preserve its waning power in the face of the newly unified Italian regime.

Alone With Her Dreams

Set in the late 1960s, the film explores the issues of immigration, community values and family devotion through the eyes of a young girl, Lucia, who is left behind with her grandmother while her parents emigrate to France to find work. Lucia pains to be with her family as she struggles to learn her role in the tiny, traditional village under the watchful guidance of her stern grandmother.

Placido Rizzotto

As a child, Sicilian Placido Rizzotto saw his father imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, and as a young man he fought in World War II, first as a soldier and then as an anti-fascist partisan. These events have left Placido with little taste for petty tyranny and with a desire to promote social justice. Upon his return home, he becomes increasingly aware that the Mafia has taken hold of his village, witnessing angry and frustrated as gangsters control local politics and take whatever they want from the people. Placido helps to form a trade union as a challenge to the Mafia's authority, and attempts to organize the villagers into a collective to grow crops in the fields taken by the Mafia.

The Four Times

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.

Strangeness

During a trip to Sicily in 1920, Luigi Pirandello meets two gravediggers-turned-playwrights rehearsing a play with their amateur dramatics. Pirandello takes an interest in the odd couple, having been suffering from writer's block while working on his eventual masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Before the Night

The life and times of Pippo Fava, a Sicilian journalist who fought the Mafia through his local newspaper in the '70s and early '80s, meeting an untimely end.

La mossa del cavallo

Montelusa, Sicily, Italy, 1877. Giovanni Bovara, the new chief inspector of the mills, is charged with collecting a severe tax. Sicilian by birth, but Ligurian by adoption, he reasons and speaks as a man of northern Italy and does not understand the dynamics of the law of silence that regulate the Sicilian land, so his intransigence immediately gives him several enemies…

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction

A re-working, re-editing, and restructuring of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One bringing it closer as originally envisioned by the late filmmaker. It includes forty-seven additional minutes which was not utilized in the film's original release. Supervised by Richard Schickel, Peter Bogdanovich, and editor Bryan McKenzie.

The Seduction of Mimi

Voting against the Mafia in what he thinks is a secret ballot costs Sicilian laborer Mimi his livelihood. He leaves his wife, flees to Turin and romances a Communist organizer – but he just can’t shake the Mafia. When they lure Mimi back to Sicily with a better job, he must keep his lover – and love child – under wraps. That’s when his wife announces she’s pregnant.

U.S. Palmese

In Palmi, a small town in Calabria, Don Vincenzo, a genial retired farmer, has a crazy idea to revive the local soccer team by organizing a bizarre fundraiser hiring the Italian major league Serie A, soccer player Etienne Morville, a bad-tempered guy but among the strongest in the world. Albeit unwillingly, Morville leaves Milan to move to Palmi and try to save his image. In the small town he will come up against a reality of sincerity, which will lead everyone on an unforgettable experience.