Filippo Ascione

2020 marks 100 years since the birth of Federico Fellini, the most prominent Italian director and one of the symbols of the insuperable cinematic heyday of mid-20th century. Fellini had always been a mysterious director, not only in his cryptic symbolism but also in his idiosyncratic, excessive mixture of psychoanalysis, Catholicism and faith in the mysterious. In this documentary, his relationship with the paranormal, luck and fate, alongside the coexistence of organized discourse and transcendence to the imaginary, is examined via friends, collaborators and distinguished fans (Friedkin, Gilliam, Chazelle). A great testimony to why rationalists and ideologists have a hard time with his work, ‘Fellini and the Spirits’ is an appropriate yet unexpected tribute.

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Amelia and Pippo are reunited after several decades to perform their old music-hall act, imitating Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, on a TV variety show.

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Felipe, an 85-year-old Italian revolutionary, watches a changing Cuba from his Havana balcony, while his son Pepe dreams of escaping to Canada, clinging to material comforts and idle ambition. As Felipe’s health declines, he forms a deep bond with his doctor Jimmi, a kindred revolutionary spirit whose secret nightlife alter ego—Estrellita, a drag performer—shocks Pepe. When Felipe dies, Pepe learns his father has left Jimmi co-ownership of the family estate in Baracoa, where his ashes are to rest. Forced to travel together across Cuba, Pepe and Jimmi begin an uneasy journey that slowly becomes one of reckoning, understanding, and redemption.

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Angelo is a forty-year-old messy man, nice but a bit of a scoundrel. He makes a living by selling fake paintings to rich Japanese on holiday, until one day he is unmasked and to escape the police who are hunting him he takes the first flight to an unknown destination. As luck would have it, the first plane he can catch takes him to Los Angeles. Having arrived in California penniless and with his credit cards blocked, he gets by for a few days as a bum when suddenly he comes up with a brilliant idea. Angelo, in fact, reads in a newspaper that the rich Italian-American entrepreneur Vittorio Di Spirito has died leaving a boundless inheritance to his son George, and he cannot help but notice that the dead rich man looks like his father in every way. Thanks to this resemblance, Angelo shows up at the funeral, staging a dramatic and heartfelt condolence, and then shows up at George's villa declaring that he is his brother...

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Luigi Di Santo is a professor of philosophy in Milan who returns to his Apulian hometown to finalize the sale, together with his brothers, of an old family farm. But this project is hampered by his violent stepbrother Aldo. Things degenerate further when the four brothers find themselves embroiled in a murder.

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