Garden of Delights

Carlo and Elisa are a successful couple. He’s a university professor and writer facing a creative block; she’s a brilliant, sharp-witted journalist, known for her internationally published editorials. They live in Rome, moving between accomplishments and routine, affection and something that might be fading. In search of new energy, they travel to Morocco with their lifelong friends, Anna and Paolo, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Vittoria—bright, curious, a little eccentric. Tensions soon rise.

A mosaic of several intertwined stories questioning the meaning of life, love and hope, set during the last six days in the life of Eluana Englaro, a young woman who spent 17 years in a vegetative state.

Clara and her two sons escape from her abusive husband with little more than their car and plan to start over in New York. After the car towed away, the family meets Alice, who gets them into an emergency shelter. While stealing food at a Russian restaurant called ‘Winter Palace’, Clara meets Marc, who has been given the chance to help the old eatery regain its former glory. The ‘Winter Palace’ soon becomes a place of unexpected encounters between people who are all undergoing some sort of crisis and whom fate has now brought together.

Pietro and Eleonora, both avid gardeners, are strangers who only meet because their two terraces are close to each other. The relationship that grows between them helps them to alleviate the pain each feels over something secret and very serious, a pain both try to hide from themselves and those around them. In this limbo they inhabit, the two make a stab at finding happiness together, until their paths diverge once more.

Julie is a new mom and children's book author, who escapes into the bright Crayola-colored world of her creation in order to leave behind the darkness caused by her post-partum depression.

The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.

At the end of World War II, shallow, self-centered Mara is the prettiest girl in her small Italian village; Bebo is a Communist partisan who is finding it difficult to adjust to the dull banalities of life in peacetime. When Mara’s father, a passionate Communist, declares that his daughter will marry the returning hero, her reactions range from joy to bitter resentment.

A hard-living salesman becomes a quadriplegic after an accident.

An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.

Heather bumps into Carla, having not spoken to her in years, and presents her with a very unexpected proposition that could change both of their lives forever.

Gioia is a high school teacher who has never known any other love than the oppressive bond with her own parents, with whom she still lives. One of the students at her school, Alessio, is cashing in on his own body to make a couple of hundred euros to help his mother, a cashier in a supermarket. The relationship that dawns between Gioia and Alessio is forbidden fruit, fragile yet, inexplicably, one they can’t do without. Still, Alessio’s desire to improve his social standing is a silent killer that prevents him from ultimately accepting Gioia’s surprising affection for him. He goes and destroys it all, cancelling the only person who has ever loved him.

An aging soccer fanatic faces down the reality of his past while struggling to give himself and a young follower very different futures.