Series Site
Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà present the 21st edition of Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, running from June 9 to 15.
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema is the leading screening series to offer U.S. audiences a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. With films by directors such as Laura Bispuri, Mario Martone, Nanni Moretti, and Paolo Taviani, this year’s edition features emerging talents and esteemed veterans, commercial and independent fare, gripping dramas and captivating documentaries.
The opening-night screening is Freaks Out, which took home the Leoncino d’Oro award at the 78th Venice Film Festival and received six 2022 David di Donatello Awards. Freaks Out is Gabriele Mainetti’s wild, jaw-dropping historical fantasy, set in 1943, concerning circus “freaks” on the run from a deranged, 12-fingered Nazi pianist who has prophesized Hitler’s suicide and seeks to harness their alleged powers to prevent it.
Of the 15 films in the Open Roads lineup, dramas are the main focus, including but not limited to: Leonardo Di Costanzo’s atmospheric third fiction feature The Inner Cage (winner of the 2022 David di Donatello Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor), a group character study set within a mostly abandoned prison; Hleb Papou’s feature debut The Legionnaire, which follows Daniel (Germano Gentile), the lone Afro-Italian member of Rome’s riot-police division, as his unit is tasked with clearing out the tenement building in which his family is squatting; Leonora addio, Paolo Taviani’s first solo feature since his brother Vittorio’s death, chronicling the fate of legendary Italian writer Luigi Pirandello’s ashes and proffering an adaptation of Pirandello’s New York–set final story; Swing Ride, the moving and surprising account of a young girl’s coming-of-age, marking Chiara Bellosi’s second fiction feature; The Peacock’s Paradise, chronicling a neurotic family as they assemble to celebrate the birthday of its matriarch (film icon Dominique Sanda) in Laura Bispuri’s fourth fiction feature, powered by a top-notch cast (including Alba Rohrwacher); and Nanni Moretti’s first literary adaptation (from a novel by Israeli author Eshkol Nevo), Three Floors, illustrating the trials and tribulations of three middle-class families who all live in the same apartment building in Rome.
Open Roads also will pay tribute to the late Monica Vitti with a special screening of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Golden Lion–winning film Red Desert, a seminal eco-psychological nightmare starring the legendary actor as Giuliana, an industrialist’s wife who stumbles through the toxic wasteland in which she lives under the influence of an obscure, debilitating anxiety.