Anna Magnani

An Italian documentary about Italian cinema.

Cinecitta is today known as the center of the Italian film industry. But there is a dark past. The film city was solemnly inaugurated in 1937 by Mussolini. Here, propaganda films would be produced to strengthen the dictator's position.

The life of the legendary Italian photojournalist Paolo Di Paolo through his photographs, which capture the essence of a fascinating and turbulent Italy, the one inhabited by Anna Magnani and Pier Paolo Pasolini, a country that no longer exists.

The destiny of legendary actress Anna Magnani through archive footage, often unpublished.

In 1948, a fan letter arrived for director Roberto Rossellini from Ingrid Bergman, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars; after a meeting in New York, Rossellini invited Bergman to Italy to work on a project. Meanwhile, Anna Magnani, one of Italy’s biggest stars and Rossellini’s longtime lover, was furious. When the Rossellini/Bergman project was announced as a tale set on Stromboli, one of the volcanic Aeolian Islands, Magnani quickly set up her own Aeolian project, financed by Hollywood, to be called Volcano. Italy’s tabloids simply went wild: the prospect of these two great divas battling it out with rival productions was breathlessly followed, especially as it became clear that the Rossellini/Bergman relationship was more than professional. Francesco Patierno has created an engrossing, revealing and highly entertaining chronicle of this cinematic battle royal.

The fascinating story of a man destined to be only a son of and who sought all his life to become "someone" by getting rid of the overwhelming image of his genius as a father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Girlfriend in a Coma is a documentary that exposes the dire situation of Italian politics and the process of economic and social decline the country has suffered during the last two decades, treating the decline as a warning of what might happen elsewhere in the West. The decline has occurred amid a collapse of moral values and the victory of “Mala Italia” over “Buona Italia”. It has been lauded as being ground-breaking in its creative combination of animation, interviews and hard facts, and has caused fierce controversy in Italy.

Forty years after his death, this documentary pays tribute to one of the major filmmakers of Italian cinema, to an original work that continues to inspire today's cinema. Coming from one of the greatest families of the Italian aristocracy, he could have been a rich and cultured man, living in opulence and idleness, but Luchino wanted a different destiny. This is the story that director Elisabeth Kapnist and Christian Dumais-Lvowski wanted to tell. Count Visconti di Modrone wears the clothes of a legend that he never stopped shaping throughout his life. This documentary reconstructs the fabric of a brilliant life, dedicated to art; theater, opera, and cinema. This artistic work is also that of a committed man, who was a fellow traveler of the Communist Party, and who resisted fascism.

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No synopsis available yet.

Bonus DVD accompanying the special edition CD "The Movie Album". The DVD contains Barbra performing "Wild Is The Wind" & "I'm In The Mood For Love", with excepts from the films they originate from playing in the background. The Movie Album is the thirtieth studio album by American singer Barbra Streisand, released on October 14, 2003, by Columbia Records. Overall her sixtieth release with her record label, it was executively produced by Streisand and her manager, Jay Landers. A concept album, it contains twelve songs from the singer's favorite films ranging in release from 1935 to 1988.

Mark Shiel is the author of “Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City.” In this 2009 video essay, he discusses Roberto Rossellini’s depiction of the urban settings in Rome Open City, Paisan and Germany Year Zero.

A short film in which Isabella Rossellini discusses the life and work of her father, Roberto Rossellini.

A study of Tennessee Williams's life and work as a whole, ranging from his youth in Mississippi and in St. Louis to success and acclaim, followed by the final difficult years. Includes some of the most celebrated scenes from film adaptations of Williams' work, among them extracts of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951),Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Night of the Iguana, The (1964), and Suddenly, Last Summer (1993) (TV). Contains footage of Williams being interviewed, including conversations with David Frost, 'Edward R. Murrow (I)', and Melvyn Bragg, as well as reminiscences from people who knew and worked with him, among them Edward Albee, Gore Vidal, and his lifelong friend, Lady Maria St. Just. Features readings from Elia Kazan's Notebook by Kim Hunter.

Traces the life of Anna Magnani, her creations, her successes, her triumphs, her boycotted career, her nonconformism, her anxieties, her generosity ... Punctuated with photos that tell her career in theater and cinema, Extracts of films, this documentary portrait also gives the floor to his friends and relatives, from Roberto Rossellini to Marcello Mastroianni, through Federico Fellini.

A documentary about the Italian cinema as art form and industry.

During World War II, Italian villagers hide their wine from the German army.

A virtually plotless, gaudy, impressionistic portrait of Rome through the eyes of one of its most famous citizens.

Rome, 1870. Opponents of the church power are being sent to prison. Some of the exhausted prisoners are asking for the mercy of Pope. Others, like Augusto Parenti, prefer to fight for their rights until the end. His wife, Teresa is a simple woman, who gets involved with the rebels.

La Sciantosa is part of a project created by writer/director Alfredo Gianetti for the Italian TV. The objective was to portrait a hundred years of Italian history through three movies, all of them with Anna Magnani. The other two are "1943: un incontro" and "L'autmobile". In this first movie, La Magnani is Flora Torres, a "sciantosa" (kind of a small stage diva) who is forgotten during the WWI, living only to remember her past glory. One day she receives a letter to present herself to the high command. There, Flora is called to go to the front and entertain the troops. Along with her maid Cristina, Flora goes to the front. There they are welcomed by the young private Tonino (Massimo Ranieri). Flora starts to act like a prima donna, making absurd demands to everyone. But when she is about to present herself, the vision of the wounded soldiers makes her change her way

An ex-prostitute, feeling an emptiness in her life, decides to fill it by buying a car.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

Val Xavier, a drifter of obscure origins, arrives at a small town and gets a job in a store run by Lady Torrence. Her husband, Jabe M. Torrance, is dying of cancer. Val is pursued by Carol Cutere, the enigmatic local tramp-of-good-family.

In this documentary, giants of italian cinema such as Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini and Zavattini talk about the importance of cinema after WW2, and about huge moments of social rebellion. This movie gives the floor to the creators of italian neorealism.

A group of Italians take a flight to Sweden: among them there are the tourists, and the immigrants.

Justin, a lyricist by trade, and his friend Pierre, a composer, lead a bohemian life in Paris. Justin thinks his mother Josefa is richer than she appears, and decides to swindle her out of three million centimes by using Pierre as an intermediary in a case involving an insolvent check. Josefa uncovers the ruse and refuses to help her son. However, Pierre has discovered the identity of his friend's father, who had been unknown to him for twenty years. With the help of Justin's mother, the two friends do everything they can to extort the son's missing three million centimes from his ashamed and repentant father.

On New Year's Eve, a young woman and an out-of-work actor complicate a pickpocket's plans to ply his trade.

On the way to a singing engagement, Anna Magnani and a taxi driver have an argument over whether her dog is a lap dog, since it costs one lira more to carry a non-lap dog in a taxi.

A grieving widow embarks on a new romance when she discovers her late husband had been cheating on her.

A widowed Nevada rancher goes to Italy and marries the sister of his deceased wife and brings her back to the ranch, but his haunting memories of his lost love and her tendency to drift away to other men cause the two to have a tough time at keeping a marriage together.

A viceroy, a nobleman and a bullfighter court a comedy-troupe actress in 18th-century Peru.

Film director Blasetti is looking for a little girl for his new movie. Along with other mothers, Maddelena takes her daughter to Cinecittà, hoping she’ll be selected and become a star. She is ready to sacrifice anything for little Maria.

A young girl comes to prison and experiences the entire prison subculture. The inmates she befriends vary from big tough dangerous dames to smaller submissive ladies who are totally lost in prison life.

Five portraits of actresses in their "common" life, seen as women rather than movie stars.

The story of Giuseppe Garibaldi's 1849 campaign to free Italy from Austrian domination.

Former prostitute Maddalena, exiled to the island of her birth by the police, suffers ostracism by the locals, as she tries to defend her younger sister's virtue from the advances of a deep-sea diver.

Anthology film by three directors, "A Day in the Country", "Jofroi" and "The Miracle".

During the Nazi occupation of 1944 Rome, Resistance leader Giorgio Manfredi is pursued by the Nazis as he seeks refuge and a means of escape.

Among others, Ernesto returns to Turin after the war from a German POW camp; his household destroyed and family deceased, he tries making an honest living.

A man comes home from the war and finds both his plant and his family destroyed.

L'Amore ('Love') is a 1948 Italian drama anthology film that consists of two parts, The Human Voice (Una voce umana), based on Jean Cocteau's 1929 play of the same title, and The Miracle (Il miracolo), based on Ramón del Valle-Inclán's 1904 novel Flor de santidad.

A comedy of errors where floundering pediatrician Pietro takes a job as an orphanage health inspector to pay for the debts of his high-spending girlfriend Loletta, only to end up mistakenly engaged with Lilli, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and pursued by lovestruck 18-year-old orphan Teresa Venerdì.

Driven by the constant quarrels with his wife and humiliated by a rich Milanese industrialist after asking him for a job, an unemployed person decides to steal a car from a garage guarded by a friend.

A mysterious man, who had lost his memory, arrives in San Marino among other refugees during the Second World War.

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The two drivers Giovanni and Gaetano are friends. Gaetano, bold and ruthless, thrives in the black market, while Giovanni, who is a naive and fundamentally honest worker from the North of Italy, cannot get any profit and his wife, an energetic and talkative Roman woman, can't help blaming him for his poor business skills. Returning from a trip to Naples, he brings home a little hungry orphan, Nello. At first Giovanni's wife doesn't want the boy, but then she begins to like him. The little boy does whatever he can to help the family. Nello's father, who everybody thought to have died during the war, finds his little son and, being a rich business man, he employs the good and generous Giovanni. Meanwhile the former friend Gaetano is caught by the police and convicted for his illegal trades.

Toto (Aldo Fabrizi), a Roman coachman with an old fashioned horse-drawn carriage who objects to the competition from motorised taxis, doesn't want his daughter Nannarella to go out with Roberto, a young taxi driver. But it is Roberto who helps him when he gets into trouble with a former client, Mary Dunchetti (Anna Magnani), an arrogant singer.

No synopsis available yet.

Thanks to wartime smuggling Gioconda Perfetti, a roman fruit vendor, becomes very rich. She leaves her shop and moves to a magnificent villa which once belonged to a count. She also becomes involved with some very dubious characters who profit from her ignorance and cheat her out of her money.

The merchant Giovanni Illes is tracked down by the debtors, but cannot pay his debts. To save her father from bankruptcy, Anna talks to the lawyer, trying to earn an extension. The lawyer grants it to him, but he gets too close, even physically. She wants to defend herself, but his power dominates the impotence of the woman.

No synopsis available yet.

Assunta, a commoner of Naples, is scarred by her lover Michele for jealousy.

A rowdy woman is so forceful that she outdoes her husband in a loud cry against speculators who refuse poor people entrance to a block of new apartments, built after WW2. Without noticing it, she starts a people's movement, and leads a march to the capital. She returns to her village a winner, an honourable MP. Yet, she is still the same simple, fiery woman, able to get in a hair-pulling brawl with the local barmaid for the affection of her man.

An opera singer hides an American soldier in his house in Nazi-occupied Rome.

Count Alberto has lost his wealth at the gaming table, he wants to commit suicide but is stopped by a doctor who offers him an exchange, a week of life with how much money he wants and then be a guinea pig for a new drug (and maybe die).

Italian version of 'Princess Tarakanova'. A film about the story of princess Élisabeth Tarakanova.

Drama set in the nineteenth century in Sorrento in southern Italy. It is an adaptation of the 1852 novel of the same title by Francesco Mastriani. A young woman named Beatrice loses her sight after witnessing the death of her mother. Unable to see Beatrice is unable to identify her mothers’ killer. The police arrest a man who they believe is the murderer. Did they get the right man or is the killer still lurking in the shadows? Years later a family friend introduces Beatrice to a renowned Doctor who specializes in restoring sight. Will Beatrice regain her sight and identify her mothers’ killer or will someone make sure that she never sees again?

Adventures of two provincial actors looking for anyway done with something to eat. They are joined by a girl, Lili. They represent a magic number, but all I get are miscues and boos.

A married woman hits a pedestrian with her car who requests that she must perform a particular punishment as a penance.

A homeless girl is taken in by an engineer. They fall in love.