Open Roads showcases new Italian cinema

Pierfrancesco Diliberto and Cristiana Capotondi in "The Mafia Only Kills in Summer"

Starting June 5, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema returns to the Film Society of Lincoln Center for its 14th edition.  The sixteen films in the series include dramas, comedies, and this year a strong emphasis on documentaries.

The festival was organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in partnership with Istituto Luce-Cinecittà, and with the support of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, the Italian Trade Commission, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò and ACP Group.  Pointing to last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar win for The Great Beauty,  Roberto Cicutto, CEO of Istituto Luce-Cinecittà, notes, “Italian cinema is once again at its peak."

Among the highlights in the series is Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA, an examination of a 44-mile highway that encircles Rome. It became the first documentary to win the Golden Lion award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival.  (It was the first year the festival allowed documentaries to compete.)  Two years in the making, Rosi's movie focuses on the eccentric characters he met whose lives are intertwined with the Grande Raccordo Anulare.

Alberto Fasulo’s Tir (or "tractor trailer"), the filmmaker's first fiction feature, won the top prize at the Rome Film Festival.  Known for his documentaries, Fasulo combines professional actors in scripted scenes with real-life truck drivers in actual settings to present a gritty, immersive look at the hard lives of immigrant workers.

Alessandra Mastronardi and Elio Germano in "The Fifth Wheel"

Open Roads shows how contemporary Italian filmmakers are blurring the lines between nonfiction and narrative, leading to "the emergence of documentary as a breeding ground for some of the most exciting developments in contemporary Italian cinema," according to Film Society of Lincoln Center Director of Programming and Artistic Director of Open Roads Dennis Lim.

Director Gianni Amelio has two movies in the series.  The deadpan comedy L’Intrepido (A Lonely Hero) is a showcase for actor Antonio Albanese, who plays a substitute who can fill in for everyone from a train conductor to a tailor.

Felice chi é diverso (Happy to Be Different) uses archival footage and interviews to survey attitudes towards homosexuality over the past hundred years.  Especially moving is the testimony of survivors of the Fascist era, who remark with wonder how "inconceivable" it was to be gay at the time.

The fiction movies offer a mix of drama and comedy.  L’Ultima Ruota del Carro (The Fifth Wheel), directed by Giovanni Veronesi, stars Elio Germano as Ernesto, a decent, upright, but not very bright youth whose efforts to forge a career are thwarted by bad advice, bad friends, and pervasive corruption.

Corruption forms the backbone of La Mafia uccide solo d’estate (The Mafia Only Kills in Summer), a coming-of-age comedy that juxtaposes Mafia massacres with the romantic yearnings of Arturo, played by writer and director Pierfrancesco Diliberto, a television star known to Italian audiences as Pif.  The story is tied to real-life criminal trials in Palermo that resulted in several assassinations—and the insistence by locals that "girl trouble," and not the Mafia, is the reason for all the murders.

"Here's how crazy the Mafia world is," Diliberto said.  "There's this girl, a Mafioso wants to go out with her, but her parents are divorced. And in the Mafia culture, divorce is very immoral. So they say, 'Why don't we kill her father? That way she's an orphan, and the moral problem disappears.'"

Edoardo Leo, center, in "I Can Quit Whenever I Want"

Crime and corruption also blend together in the most audacious movie in the series, Smetto Quando Voglio (I Can Quit Whenever I Want), a fast-paced, scabrous account of Peter Zinni (Edoardo Leo), a neurobiologist in Rome whose world threatens to collapse when he loses a research grant.

Instead, Zinni and his friends—unemployed college graduates stuck in demeaning, low-paying jobs—exploit a loophole in Italian law that makes designer drugs legal until specific molecules are outlawed.  It's "The Big Bang Theory" meets "Breaking Bad," with the specter of an overqualified workforce with nowhere to go dominating the story.

Director Sydney Sibilia makes a smashing debut, conducting a strong ensemble cast through increasingly desperate reversals and double-crosses and staging complicated scenes with aplomb.  Filled with throwaway visual gags and doubletalk, it's the kind of movie in which the country's preeminent Latin scholars find themselves pumping gas, off the books, for an illegal alien.

Valeria Solarino felt she had a chance winning the part of Giulia when Sibilia broke up during her audition. A veteran of dramas and romantic comedies, she was delighted to act in what she called her "first funny comedy.  The story came from a little news item about two street sweepers who were overheard talking about Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason. I think Sibilia made it into a very true picture of what Italy is like today."

The series continues until June 16.  Catch them now, because only L’Intrepido has found an American distributor so far.