An absolute masterpiece of world cinematography, Roma città aperta was made by Roberto Rossellini in 1945. Considered the manifesto of Italian neorealism, it is the first work in the War Trilogy directed by the Roman director, followed by Paisà (1946) and Germania anno zero (1948). 
During the Nazi occupation of Rome, German police are hunting down Manfredi, an engineer who leads a branch of the Resistance. Having narrowly escaped a search on his apartment, he finds refuge with Don Pietro, a suburban parish actively involved in the fight against the Nazi-Fascists. However, Manfredi is still in danger because his lover, Marina, is close to a Gestapo collaborator who supplies her with drugs. Filmed with makeshift means in January 1945, just months after Rome’s liberation, around the city and in the suburbs, this neorealist masterpiece is a cry of outrage against the Nazi-Fascist war. The film achieved immediate success abroad, winning the Palme d'Or at the first Cannes Film Festival in 1946 and an Oscar nomination for screenplay in 1947. Anna Magnani's memorable performance of strong dramatic intensity earned her the Nastro d'Argento as best supporting actress and made her famous worldwide.

A year after Roma città aperta, Rossellini felt the need to reflect once again on the still-open wounds in the consciences of Italians. Through six unrelated episodes, the film depicts the advance of the Allied troops into Italy. It starts with an episode on the invasion of Sicily, where a young girl meets an American soldier. The next story is set in Naples: the main characters are an African-American soldier and a child who robs him. The third episode takes place in Rome, where a soldier meets a prostitute and tells her about a girl he had met time before. The fourth episode portrays the dramatic days of the liberation of Florence, where a woman searches for her painter friend, now a partisan leader. The fifth episode is set in Romagna, in the tranquil setting of a small convent on the Gothic Line, which is disrupted by the ongoing events. The final episode, set in the Po Delta, celebrates the courageous efforts of Italian partisans in the swamps of the Po Valley.

Germania anno zero is not only one of the masterpieces of neorealism but also of cinema tout court. The ideal conclusion to a trilogy that began with Roma città aperta and Paisà, it tells the story of little Edmund, who lives on his wits in a war-torn Germany, trying to support his invalid father. The material ruins of a Berlin prostrated by the bombings corresponds to the moral ruins of a people who came out anything but unscathed from the Nazi tragedy. Rossellini recounts a harsh and ruthless everyday life without rhetorical concessions but immersing it in the suspended time of the soul.

Restored as part of the Rossellini Project, sponsored by Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Cineteca di Bologna, CSC - Cineteca Nazionale and Coproduction Office

A masterpiece of British noir, The Third Man is a is a thrilling plunge into the shadowed underworld of postwar Vienna, in which espionage, political intrigue, adventure and plot twists are interwoven with an immortal performance from Orson Welles.  Written by Graham Greene who later published its famous novel, the film won the Grand Prix at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Award for best black-and-white photography in 1951, and was voted in 1999 by the British Film Institute as the best British film of all time.

4K restored version

A cinephilic divertissement, a parade of stars from today and, ideally, yesterday: Hail, Caesar! is a noir, a musical, a western, a romantic comedy. It is the dream factory observed and told by the Coen brothers with their classic desecrating verve: art and industry, ideas and money, reality and illusion. In the film, the Coens reflect on the world of Hollywood by making a veritable “carousel” of faces, film genres and paradoxical situations that the producer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has to deal with, facing all kinds of problems, from the whims of stars to production hold-ups, from keeping newspaper gossips at bay to reassuring New York financiers, to the disappearance of the lead actor from the set, in a Hollywood that is funny and witty, as well as beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins. 

An epoch-making film that entered the collective imagination thanks to John Travolta's performance as the swaggering Tony Manero, a symbol of American youth in the golden age of disco music, with its record-breaking soundtrack mainly composed by the Bee Gees. These ingredients gave the film a huge success, yet Saturday Night Fever is also exemplary for how it managed to tie those popular phenomena to a discourse of social exclusion in a metropolitan context, miles away from Studio 54’s celebrity glitz and glitter, focusing instead on young men and women hoping to become someone on a Brooklyn dance floor in a working-class neighborhood filled with racial tensions, their dreams clashing with real life’s desperate ordeals and misgivings. 

Introduced by the director of the Cineteca di Bologna, Gianluca Farinelli

Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece, freely inspired by Joseph Conrad's book Heart of Darkness, is a journey through the horrors and absurdities of war with a powerful and visually stunning narrative and an unforgettable Marlon Brando. Considered among the most celebrated Vietnam conflict films of all time, Apocalypse Now is a vivid depiction of the insoluble moral dilemma constituted by war; a dilemma centered on the figures of Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) - a U.S. Army deserter who is supposed to embody evil, madness and deviance - and Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) - a sicario, to whom it falls, generically, to personify goodness, reasoning and respect for "rules." However, the film's development suggests at least a partial relocation of these two figures and the values they represent, as well as a serious discussion of the human difficulty of clearly separating good and evil, madness and reasoning, norm and rebellion. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 32nd Cannes Film Festival and two Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Sound.

The restored version APOCALYPSE NOW - FINAL CUT will be screened, which allowed the use of the latest technologies to create an extraordinary sensory experience, with deep colors and multifaceted sound that amplifies the film's hypnotic effect.

Presented at the Cannes film festival in 1991, this documentary illustrates the sensational events that unfolded during the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Featuring Eleanor Coppola’s footage of the Philippines production and additions of new interviews with the original cast, the film details the director’s self-financed, chaotic creation, teetering on the brink of complete collapse. The title comes from Hearts of Darkness by Joseph Conrad which inspired Apocalypse Now. In 1990, Eleanor turned her material over to filmmakers George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr, who brought together this fascinating account of the challenges faced by Francis Ford Coppola on this epic project that more often than not seemed insurmountable. An investigation of creative obsession, ego and power in which the boundaries between reality and the fiction being enacted eventually blur.

An absolute and unanimously recognized masterpiece of Alfred Hitchock's cinema, Vertigo was voted one of the 10 best U.S. films of all time by the American Film Institute. Based on the novel “D'entre les morts,” written by Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau, it features outstanding performances by Kim Novak and James Stewart.
Suffering from vertigo after an accident in the line of duty, John “Scottie” Ferguson leaves the police force and agrees to work for an old school friend who asks him to watch over his wife Madeleine, who in recurring states of unconsciousness seems possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, her great-grandmother who died by suicide a century earlier. Ferguson becomes fascinated by the unhappy woman, and when he is forced to intervene to save her from a suicide attempt at sea a romance begins between the two. But a tragedy is about to disrupt the lives of both.
Of all of Hitchock’s films, this is the most existential: beneath the Technicolor varnish meanders a sense of unease, of human inadequacy, of useless reason, a journey into the dark side of the psyche. Suspended between reality and dream, thriller and melodrama, popular work and auteur experiment, the film of the master of suspense constitutes a unicum in its ability to exalt every detail of cinematic style.

An espionage story seen against the backdrop of the development in 1915 of the Zeppelin airship, which began with peaceful intentions but later developed as a means of warfare.
During World War I, a young British officer of German descent is sent to Germany by intelligence to spy on the design of a revolutionary new airship capable of bombing from very high altitudes that could decide the fate of the war. The officer succeeds in winning the trust of the colonel heading the project by boarding the Zeppelin during his first secret mission to Scotland to attempt to steal the Magna Carta. Warned by him, however, British soldiers arrive in force, disrupting the German plans.
A gripping suspenseful thriller with spectacular scenes and special effects combined with unforgettable images of the extraordinary airship.

In the Holland of the second half of the 17th century, young Griet finds herself serving in the house of master Johannes Vermeer. Their cultural and social differences do not prevent the painter from discovering in the girl a particular flair for art: he will make her his muse as well as a model for a portrait that will remain an icon of Flemish painting. The intimate tale restores the settings and tone of the painting of the time, reflects that culture, and brings out the subtle network of ideal feelings that can be established between an artist and a humble girl with no other purpose than the creation of beauty and harmony. Between the two is imagined to be born a “creative commonality” to which no words are needed. All she needs, in fact, is the materiality of painting: the manipulation of colors, the arrangement of objects, the choice of lights and shadows.  Like the painter, the servant girl happens to see what is in the camera obscura (according to a technique of analysis and study of forms and colors that seems to have been Vermeer's own). She sees in it the truth of imagination, that truth which, in an object or a person, is able to capture the sense of the moment, and which is able to make it absolute, suspended in the play of shadows and colors.

The film recounts through the eyes of a worker one of the most serious cases of abuse in the workplace in Italian history. The title takes the name of the building of the same name, an acronym for “Cold Rolling Mill” and a department of the ILVA steel plant in Taranto, where employees who opposed the downgrade were confined and mobbed. Unable to fire them, they were left to do nothing. The aim was to force them to accept the demotion or quit. Instead, naive worker Caterino La Manna (Michele Riondino) believes that this is heaven on earth for the privileged few (getting paid for not working?) and accepts the proposal of the abject official Giancarlo Basile (Elio Germano) to spy on the inmates in the Palazzina and report back to him whether they plan to give in or take legal action. Whether the young man will be able to understand the reality of the situation is the plot's Ariadne's thread. Michele Riondino makes his directorial and screenwriting debut with a film with a solid civil structure and grotesque, angry echoes that recall Elio Petri's La classe operaia va in paradiso : in the surreal nothingness of the Palazzina, one cannot help but laugh, of bitter despair. Winner of three David di Donatello and five Nastri d'Argento prizes.

For more than a decade, environmentalists have been occupying the ancient Hambach forest in western Germany to try to stop the RWE company's huge bulldozers and prevent the deforestation required for the expansion of a giant lignite mine. In 2018, during a harsh police clearance operation, later declared illegal by the court, Steffen Meyn, a film student shooting the events, lost his life by falling from a tree. The film is based on material he collected over the course of two years through a 360-degree Camera. The student, enthusiastic about the struggle and solidarity among activists, seems critical, however, of the radical nature of the protests. A chronicle told from a personal perspective, highlighting paradoxes and daily difficulties of a militant, between the spirit of dedication, violence suffered, idealism and coming face to face with a painful reality. 
Winner of the Audience Award at the Cinemambiente 2024 Festival, the film chronicles the “behind-the-scenes” story of the huge machines depicted in some of Vera Lutter's works in the exhibition.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece is a profound reflection on the illusory nature of the glance and the deceptive quality of reality, an enigmatic and incomprehensible reality filtered through the camera lens. Based on a short story by Julio Cortàzar, the film tells the story of a successful fashion photographer in the swinging London of the 1960s. The detective story that unravels from the ever-increasing enlargements of images taken by chance (the film's title refers to the operation of enlarging photographs) opens up puzzling personal and universal questions. The investigation that Thomas tries to pursue, starting with the detail of a gun and a dead body found in the photographs, is bound to collide with the reality of a society in which what one sees does not always correspond to what it actually is.

Antonio Albanese directs a touching and socially meaningful film that points the camera at abuses and injustices, telling stories of ordinary people victimized by market society. 
Antonio, a former shipyard worker, leads a quiet life: he plays bocce with friends, takes care of his mother, has an ex-wife and Emilia, his one and only beloved daughter, who one day announces to him that she is getting married. Antonio is filled with joy and wants to give her the reception of her dreams with his life savings. However, the bank seems to be hiding something. Antonio will discover, despite himself, that those who guard our treasures do not always guard our dreams as well.