The protagonists of this documentary will be Nouri Bouzid, the author of Les sabots d’or supposed to be the most beautiful and important among the Tunisian films of last twenty years, and his colleagues - Taieb Louichi, Ferid Boughedir – and the producer Ahmed Attia. Thought their eyes as narrators and directors and with the help of their movies, we would compose a sort of unexpected and original portrait of Arabic-Tunisian world and of his relationship with Europe and Western world.
That portrait will be made in two different levels; on the first one we would see Tunisia from the inside, with all its problems and contradictions, thought clips from some movies chosen among the masterpieces of Bouzid and his colleagues; cinema would be as an archive of images which will represent Arabic life and culture; and inside these movies we would find out the most scabrous and forbidden issues: women’s condition, homosexuality, political corruption, repression of who rebels to the dictatorship, the underground development of Islamic fundamentalism in the shadow of official religion.
On its second level the documentary would take the shape of a road movie, a travel along the whole Tunisia, starting from the heart of Tunisi until the desert regions, in the deepest south of the Country.
Along this travel we would be able to interview the directors – protagonists of the documentary – in the exact places where they chose to set their movies, and we would talk with them, from the outside, that is from the personal point of view of the European director, about his own vision, his opinions and emotions about Tunisia and Arabic world in general.

Adam, a Canadian documentarist of Sicilian origins, is in Palermo for his first time ever to do some scouting for a work about Inquisition. As he is told that some graffiti made by prisoners in an old palace had been found out by Giuseppe Pitrè in 1906, he decides to visit a museum that bears Pitrè’s name. Here he is fascinated and interested by the great deal of writings and finds Pitré had left and above all by the correspondence he had with so many people of his period.
On the strength of these letters he starts discovering Palermo, and visiting places where Pitré had lived. His investigation on Sicilian demo-psycologist gets richer of writitten and shooted testimony. He meets university professors, populaces, puppet-masters, fishmen, musicians; he takes part in feasts, processions, going troughout Sicily from Palermo to Trapani, Messina, and even to Siracusa
His journey in Pitré’s Sicily becomes a discovery of Sicily of nowadays. While regaining his own roots, in a land permeated by different cultures, Adam has the opportunity to know better himself and the sense of being in that world.

The scientist Guglielmo Marconi, soon before his death, developed revolutionary theories kept strictly confidential; the sole traces of them can be found in some statements made by Benito Mussolini. However, there is a man who was a concealed assistant of the scientist, a co-worker with fertile ideas and creative experiments, who is the one and only witness of the mysterious Marconi’s work. This man is Pier Luigi Ighina. Pier Luigi Ighina has lived at Imola since 1936, in a big house-laboratory near the racing track, surrounded by imposing and colourful apparatuses capable of extraordinary things - some can even control the atmospheric conditions. He has always said that he was responsible for the rain that often caused problems to the Formula One races.
In January 2004, after having spent more than eighty years in experiments and studies, Pier Luigi Ighina died. The authoritative science believe his theories absurd and not worth of being taken into consideration.
Some researchers spread all over the world are carrying on Ighina’s studies, and one of the reasons is that when his machinery went into operation something inexplicable happened…

The aim of the project is to acquaint people with some Italian gardens that have been of historical, civic and environmental importance to our country’s anthropological evolution over centuries.
The unique idea of gardens was born of Eden and paradises where men begin and end their lives; where ideals tend to meld and intermingle with aspirations and achievements that over time have created a history of gardens. The twentieth century ushered gardens into a boundless world without preordained patterns in which the place, the genius loci, prevails over impulses stemming from academic theories or social and economic conditioning. A fertile climate for gardens was created where timeless atmospheres can co-exist with environmental art collections which define the spaces of the soul and the spirit. From Sicily to Lombardy, these parks have participated in the aesthetical transition to the second millennium. Gardens’ value derives not only from their great beauty; they are also a tangible example of a natural habitat’s ability to adapt and survive over time. This ability has enabled man to learn, feed himself and develop without become extinct. The enormous changes in environmental conditions across the whole planet have led to environmental awareness being an important and necessary condition that supports the fundamental role it plays in increasing civic sense and being knowledgeable about the identifying characteristics of a territory. This is why modern gardens fulfill a need, the rhythms and problems of people today. A garden is not just a blueprint of a garden: as we used to say, it is a place for the soul we run to whenever we can get away from the city, work, pollution - where we go to experience feelings we love. Gardens are therefore not utopias beloved by ecologists or environmentalists. To garden or visit a garden necessarily includes mingling with nature. And experiencing a garden means slowly familiarizing with a natural microcosm, approaching it closer and closer in order to understand the nature it enfolds so as to then be able to deal with and respect this nature when we live its entirety and we cross its infinite spaces, either for a visit or on a daily basis. A garden is a cultural activity: it implies technical interventions, alterations to the scenario and consequently, refined sensibilities. Man’s intervention is implicit, but it cannot disregard nature’s laws. Gardening, and therefore gardens, is the only form of aesthetics that takes place entirely within nature’s boundaries; it is a strong, intensely allusive example, which makes us understand what would be possible if we were to indulge nature and understand it rather than force its patterns as is typically done in modern times.

Italian silent cinema started one hundred years ago in Turin. But why in Turin? What conditions enabled the city of the House of Savoy to maintain its supremacy, for many years, over Rome and Milan, also involved in the revolution of cinema? Our project will try to narrate the rise and fall of the seventh art in the capital of the region of Piedmont during a period of great cultural ferment. The pioneers Ambrosio and Pastrone will be portrayed as they actually were: craftsmen with a lively imagination, a bit artists, a bit hucksters, talented impresarios, yet incapable of facing the last battle during the crisis of cinema in the twenties. Their respective adventures, Pastrone’s and Ambrosio’s, will be narrated by the voice of one of their fierce competitors, whom at the time we would have defined an outsider: Ernesto Maria Pasquali..

Pasquali (1883-1919) was a man of letters, before becoming a man of cinema. His original and careful analysis of the Turin society at the beginning of the 20th century emerged clearly in his fresh, spontaneous, ironic and never banal newspaper articles. He cast his inquisitive eye on people, places and events in Turin, always attentive and involved, and his pieces were a pleasure to read and had a taste that distinguished them from others due to the youthful and direct style that had nothing to do with pomposity and rhetoric. And reading them again today allows us to go back in time, to an age that was about to be violently wiped away by World War I and the changes that it would bring about.

It isn’t a course on an exposition event: the exhibition won’t be shoot.
The painting will instead be filmed inside a place that no one has seen before, such a fascinating place for the viewer: the rooms of Palazzo Koelliker, where the collector lives.
The protagonists of the documentary, will be the paintings, narrated as stories, short scripts, each referring to the themes of their original era and to a pictorial trend that for the first time ever had crossed the borders of a country and achieved an European echo. Three more characters, over the paintings, will interact: the supervisor of Palace Chigi, arch. Francesco Petrucci, the exposition curator, Gianni Papi and the collector, Luigi Koelliker. Each one inspired by his own relationship with Caravaggeschi. Why Caravaggeschi?
Because in those latest years Michelangelo Merisi’s followers were revalued and more and more praised: not only as capable master copier, but also as artists themselves who developed an independent language, made up of original ideas and forward impulses.
The same revaluation which has found out in this stream the germs of Barocco style.
The Caravaggio’s followers celebration went through a series of important exhibitions. The latest will be opened in October 2006 at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, “I caravaggeschi a Roma”: 85 great paintings from Koelliker collection, most of them unknown.

8th September, 1944. Nighttime. San Tomé, a hamlet seven kilometers from Forlì. An officer in the occupying German army is critically wounded in a mine explosion. The attackers are not identified but the method used would seem to rule out the partisans.
At dawn on 9th September the reprisal starts.
Together, the fascist Black Brigades and a Nazi special forces unit round up two hundred and twenty peasants in the area: six of them will be hanged.
At the very last minute political prisoners are substituted for the victims, but the fascists and the Nazis are merciless: they force the peasants to carry out the hangings. One of them rebels and without further ado he is added to the list of those to be executed. In all the confusion a German major stands out; he is in charge of a telecommunications unit stationed in San Tomé.
Realizing how atrocious his colleagues’ decision is and relying on his rank, he opposes the Nazi special forces and has the imprisoned peasants freed, thus saving the seventh intended victim’s life and stopping innocent people from becoming executioners. The fascists and the Nazis have to bloody their own hands.
The German major succeeds but his senior officers, as soon as they hear of this, punish him by sending him straight to the Russian front.
Before his departure he leaves a sign of his love for Italy: a favorite book he carries everywhere with him: “Voyage to Italy” by Goethe.
The massacre in San Tomé goes down in history as one of the saddest events in the history of our country, but few people remember the major who averted an even worse tragedy.

The story is set in Cervia – Milano Marittima in the summer of 1942. In 1942, the Riviera of Romagna, from Milano Marittima to Cesenatico, had become a convalescent area for the ill and the wounded coming from the fronts, where hotels were used as military hospitals. In times of peace, those buildings were used for the summer vacations. The tourist season seemed more of an act of faith than a commercial reality.There were very few vacationers, mainly women - mothers with young children - because most of the men were dressed in grey-green. Few hotels were open. The guests were mainly medical officers working at the military hospitals who lived side by side with the rare tourists.The distant echoes of the war were amplified by the radio news, listened to with the resignation of those who now believed that the war for Italy was turning for the worse. Even occasional events, such as the surfacing of a mine, were clear and dramatic signs of the Apocalypse that was drawing nearer and nearer.
The presence of so many servicemen increased the number of spies of the Regime. The morale of servicemen had to be kept high. Religious village feasts and festivals were tolerated by the regime.
Against this background, Paolo, a 19 year-old student arrives in Milano Marittima, coming from Forlì. He has just passed his school-leaving exam and enrolled at the faculty of Architecture in Florence. He has reached his father for a short holiday, who has been recently recalled to military service and detailed in Milano Marittima as administrative commander of the hospital set up on the former premises of the Montecatini company. In the hotel, Paolo recognises a very pretty and much courted school friend. He discovers and is troubled by the extreme womanliness of the maid. He feels friendship towards and has a liking for the daughter of a fisherman who has just graduated from the teachers’ training college.
However, his sensitiveness and fantasy are attracted by a very young and reserved fair-haired German girl, Hanna, who is staying at the hotel with her mother and a male student friend. In the changing attitudes of the young German girl, who alternates moments of silence and sudden bursts of joy, Paolo senses there is a mystery, which initially seems to have no solution. Than unexpected love arrives and an hope for the future. Some hours before the end of 15th August feast. The day after War knocks to the door without any chance for Paolo and Hanna. This is a story that actually occurred, a metaphor of the sacrifice of generations of youths in the maelstrom of war that annihilates everything, first and foremost the pureness of love.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION...