(1) screening: PANE E TULIPANI (Bread and Tulips; 2000)
Monday,  14 APRIL @ 5:30 pm
[in Italian with English subtitles]

Silvio Soldini's amiable new comedy suggests that an older, better Italy of imagination, rationality and civility survives on the fringes of a modern nation obsessed, like most others, with consumerism, empty prosperity and easy pleasure. That other Italy exists, according to the film, in Venice, a city whose narrow streets and quiet canals make it the perfect home for gentle eccentrics and good-hearted bohemians. The city serves as a refuge for Rosalba Barretto (Licia Maglietta), an unhappy housewife from Pescara who, along with her husband and teenage sons, is one of the tourists in the first scene. After the tour bus leaves a highway rest area without her, Rosalba impulsively hitchhikes to Venice, where she finds kindness, mystery and opportunities for self-expression -- everything that had been missing from her ordinary life.
-- A.O. Scott, The New York Times

(2) screening: GIORNI E NUVOLE (Days and Clouds; 2007)
Wednesday, 16 APRIL @ 5:00 pm
7:00 pm meeting with director & reception following film
[in Italian with English subtitles]

[In] Days and Clouds ... a happy, well-adjusted married woman living in the beautiful seaport city of Genoa suddenly has to adapt to an entirely new and different reality as the carpet is pulled out from under her comfortable middle-class existence.
Elsa (Margherita Buy) is an aspiring art historian who has returned to school to get her degree; she passes much of her time engrossed in a delicate restoration project. As she gently scrapes away at the ceiling of an ancient chapel, long-hidden angels gradually surface into the light of day. Much to her surprise, another form of reality also emerges from the shadows to cast a very different kind of light into her life.
Soldini skilfully takes this premise - an increasingly common predicament in today's world, where middle-aged executives all at once find themselves unemployable in a market that favours youth - and explores the couple's small victories and disappointments with finely etched detail. The familiar travails of Elsa and Michele's marriage become wonderfully transcendent in the hands of Soldini and his two principal actors.
-- Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival

Please feel free to bring friends, family or visitors who may be interested.
Admission free of charge. All films in Italian with English subtitles.

Click the following links to find out more about past film series and featured directors.

Winter 2008 -- Director Alex Infascelli
Winter 2008 -- Director Edoardo Winspeare
Fall 2007 -- Actor Luigi Lo Cascio
Fall 2007 -- Director Daniele Luchetti
Spring 2007 --Actress Maya Sansa
Winter 2007 -- Gabriele Salvatores
Fall 2006 -- Giuseppe Piccioni
Spring 2006 -- Mimmo Calopresti
Winter 2006 -- Paolo Virzi'
Fall 2005 -- Matteo Garrone