Winner of the 2020 Berlin Golden Bear, Mohammad Rasoulof's intense film explores the value of life and the weight of individual choices in an oppressive system. Heshmat, a family man; Pouya, a conscript; Javad, a conscript on leave; and Bahram, a doctor, are the protagonists of four sweeping stories that explore the death penalty in Iran from the perspective of those forced to carry it out against their will. Victims in turn of a vicious power, the characters question to what extent it is possible to exercise free will under a despotic regime. ‘Have you ever been asked to do something you never wanted to do?’ ’What is the point of telling the truth if it can destroy a life?’ There is no evil pushes the viewer to identify with the moral dilemmas of the protagonists and to ask themselves the same question: to obey or oppose? The film is in the tradition of contemporary Iranian realism, alternating rawness and visual beauty between spectacular landscapes, convivial moments and rising tension.

Presentation by Iranian director Amir Naderi, master of independent art cinema, in conversation with Paolo Pellicano of the Cineteca di Bologna

Two coming-of-age stories, the fruit of the early cinematographic experiences of Abbas Kiarostami and Amir Naderi, masters of the Iranian Nouvelle Vague, expressed through light and movement.

Experience, the medium-length film debut of Kiarostami, one of the most important contemporary filmmakers, recounts Naderi's early days in Tehran when, after moving from southern Iran, he supported himself by working in a photography studio.

Waiting, by Amir Naderi, was released in Iranian cinemas only three years after it was made, due to problems with local censorship. The film, which won an award at the 1975 Cannes Children's Festival, is a kind of magical realist parable that follows the simple daily tasks of a boy. Naderi's realistic approach is underlined by a mise-en-scene devoid of dialogue and musical commentary.

Inspired by the true story of Lindy Chamberlain and nominated for Oscars and Golden Globes, A Cry in the Dark earned Meryl Streep the "Prix d'interprétation féminine" at the Cannes Film Festival. The film recreates a news event that took place in Australia in 1980: a couple spends a camping vacation near Ayers Rock with their three children. During the night, their nine-month-old baby girl, Azaria, disappears, probably killed by a dingo. However, public opinion and sensationalist press lead to the mother being falsely accused, tried and convicted. After many years, her version of events will be confirmed, finally recognizing her innocence. A Cry in the Dark fits into the legal thriller tradition with a social investigation of identity roots, a recurring theme in Australian filmmaking of the 1970s.

Directed by George Miller and winner of six Academy Awards in 2016, Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth chapter in the legendary Mad Max saga.
In the heart of a postapocalyptic, dystopian future, where water and gasoline are nearly depleted resources due to nuclear wars and natural disasters, the dictator Immortan Joe has absolute control over vital resources and, consequently, over the surviving population. Former police officer Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy), tormented by grief from severe family bereavement, manages to escape the dictator's army by joining Empress Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a rebel warrior in his army. When Immortan Joe discovers the two of them escaping in an armored tanker truck, he begins a fierce chase across the desert, setting off a series of spectacular battles, including speed, violence and survival.

Secrets & Lies won the Palme d'Or for best film and the award for best female performance at the 49th Cannes Film Festival. The film explores hidden secrets and old lies, highlighting universal family issues: loneliness, attempts to repair relationships, misunderstandings. The melancholy and unresolved dialogues, which take place mainly indoors, are the key narrative element, keeping the viewer in constant apprehension. Secrets & Lies makes one reflect on the theme of identity and appearance, the impression one wants to give others and the impression others perceive. 

Winner of a David di Donatello for Best Foreign Language Film, an Academy Award for Best Score and three BAFTAs in 1998, The Full Monty is a comedy that wryly and cleverly explores the difficulties of the working class.
In Sheffield, Britain's main steel center of the 1960s, factories and mills are closing, leaving many workers unemployed. A group of metalworkers decide to earn some money by stripping, which will lead to numerous comic complications in their lives. The film, with a mix of discretion and irony manages to deal with the devastating effects of unemployment on the social, familial, and psychological levels by combining intelligence, seriousness, and sensitivity, without ever coming across as either moralistic or schematic.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize and the Golden Ciak at the 45th Venice International Film Festival (1988), the film reconstructs the massacre of the tirailleurs sénégalais, the African soldiers enlisted in the French colonial forces, which took place in the Thiaroye transit camp on the outskirts of Dakar in November 1944. The soldiers waited to receive their promised pay and rewards before returning to their countries after fighting for France against the Nazis. But instead of being rewarded, they are humiliated and discriminated against by French officers, who confine them in inhumane conditions and deny them the rights they won on the battlefield. Their rebellion will be crushed in a massacre. Sembène deals with historical rigor and psychological depth with an event long censored, restoring it to its proper memory.

Winner of the Golden Bear at the 74th Berlinale, the documentary chronicles the return to Benin of twenty-six objects belonging to the Kingdom of Dahomey, stolen by the French colonial army French in 1892 and kept for over a century at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris.
Dahomey follows the process and the return journey from Paris to Porto Novo in November 2021 through a narrative that blends magical realism and political reflection. Giving voice to the story is Ghezo, one of the returned statues, who expresses his stream of consciousness in an oracular and enigmatic tone. The director addresses the theme of identity and postcolonial relations, focusing particularly on the restitution of artworks. The scars of the past that have never healed emerge, told in a fantastical key. Dahomey is a documentary that moves between fantasy, political manifesto and art film, while maintaining a rigorous aesthetic approach.

Winner in 2011 of the Golden Bear at the 61st Berlin Film Festival (the first Iranian film to win this award) and in 2012 of the Golden Globe, Oscar, César and David di Donatello awards for Best Foreign Language Film. Nader and Simin are an upper middle-class family in Tehran. Simin would like to leave Iran, but her husband disagrees: he is worried about the fate of his elderly father who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The different intentions of one and the other will lead to their separation. A story that has its roots in Tehran but, thanks to the director's narrative skill, takes on universal significance.

Winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, the film tells the story of Mr. Badī who is looking for someone willing to help him fulfill his last wish: to bury him under a cherry tree the morning after his suicide. He meets a number of different characters, but each has a reason for refusing the job. The only one to accept is a Turkish clerk, who needs money for his sick son's medical treatment. Essential in form, the film deals with the big questions of existence with naked realism and intense symbolism. 

World premiering at the Berlin Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival 2023, Limbo is a noir focusing on the discrimination of Aboriginal communities by Australians. Detective Travis Hurley is tasked with investigating the unsolved murder of a young Aboriginal woman 20 years earlier. Despite resistance from the local community, he manages to build a close bond with the victim's family, immersed in a limbo of suffering and hidden truths.  

The film draws inspiration from the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington and brings to the screen a story little known to the general public: the story of the “stolen generation.” Between the early decades of the twentieth century and the 1970s, some 30,000 children of mixed ancestry (born to Aboriginal and British parents) were forcibly taken from their families by state authorities and locked up in special reeducation “camps” with the aim of erasing their Aboriginal identity. Among the victims were Molly, Gracie and Daisy Craig, three little girls who embarked on a dangerous journey in order to return home, skirting the Rabbit Proof Fence, the thousands of miles-long fence built to stop rabbits ravaging crops across the country.

Winner of the New York Film Critics' Awards for Best Picture and Best Director in 1971 and the Silver Ribbon for Best Director in 1971, the film, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name, is a highly politically and sociologically charged work that questions the concept of free will, questioning with extreme lucidity the relationship between the violent instinct of the individual and the institutionalized violence of the state.

In seemingly idyllic 17th-century England, an aristocrat's wife commissions twelve drawings of her husband's estate from an ambitious landscape painter who negotiates the terms of the contract to include the client's favors. When a dead body is found in the moat, the painter's drawings threaten to reveal more than he realizes.

First Cameroonian feature film to be internationally recognized. Through the telling of a delicate and emotionally impactful love story, the film denounces certain themes of African patriarchal tradition: the obligation of dowry, arranged marriages, the buying and selling of virgins, and the son as an absolute value.

In Gourba, a village on the edge of the Sahel, rampant poverty forces the population to choose: wait for international aid or leave for richer parts of Burkina Faso? Salam and his family choose the second solution by embarking on an adventurous journey in which they rediscover love, joy, hatred, violence, forgotten feelings of hunger and thirst.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2022, the film portrays two parallel love stories. In both, the lovers are tormented by hidden and inescapable obstacles: the power of superstition and the dynamics of power. The film was shot clandestinely by director Jafar Panahi, who has been persecuted by the Iranian regime for years.

Nine episodes of daily life in Tehran that reveal the nonsense of a system that controls, sanctions, and regulates every aspect of citizens' existence. From someone who must know the Koran perfectly in order to work to someone who lost his dog in contravention of the law, to a little girl who would like to wear jeans and a T-shirt to school. Small, ordinary stories, told with simplicity and irony, but in which the full weight of the Iranian regime is well perceived.

From the director of The Dead Poet's Society, The Truman Show and Master & Commander, a drama shrouded in mystery that unfolds on Valentine's Day 1900. During a field trip to Hanging Rock, several students and the teacher of an Australian girls' school vanish without a trace.

A girl and her younger brother are stranded in the desert area in the interior of Australia where they learn to survive with the help of an Aboriginal boy who is facing the “walkabout,” a kind of ritual exile from his tribe that he must pass as an initiatory test.

Bullied at school and abused at home by his uncaring mother and overbearing older brother, Billy Casper, a 15-year-old working-class boy born and raised in Yorkshire, distracts himself from the problems of everyday life by taming and training his pet hawk.

A young alien is sent to Earth with the task of annihilating humanity. Taking on the guise of a woman and the name Laura Flynn, she begins to sow victims by exploiting her own beauty. Her plans, however, do not go exactly as planned.

Angola, 1961. Domingos Xavier, an anti-colonialist militant and member of the popular movement for the liberation of Angola, is arrested by Portuguese secret police and taken to an unknown destination. His wife Maria travels across the country with her child to find him.

Restored in 4K in 2021 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna.

Young Senegalese Diouana moves from Dakar to Antibes in the service of a French couple, attracted by a more cosmopolitan lifestyle. Soon, however, she sees her dreams shattered in colonialist racism: never paid and treated as a slave, Diouana ends up undergoing a severe process of alienation that will lead to depression.