Italiani da vedere

The neorealistic story follows the uneventful lives of Francesco, Sergio, and Antonio, three young men who live in a small, poverty-stricken village. Since all three are unemployed, they while their time away roaming the streets and chasing girls. One day Antonio's aunt asks him to stay with her and his cousins in Rome. He accepts her offer and enrolls at a university in Rome, leaving his two friends behind to envy him for his new upscale lifestyle. But eventually Antonio returns to the village, initially just for a day. Though he boasts about his life, he never goes back to Rome and instead opts for his friends and the place he grew up, despite all its shortcomings.

A man returns to visit his native Sicily after living in New York for a long time. He learns about the Sicilian way of life from stylized conversations with an orange picker, his fellow train passengers, his mother, and a knife-sharpener.

A trilogy of stories of well-off youths who commit murders. In the French episode, a group of high school students kill one of their colleagues for his money. In the Italian episode, a university student's involved in smuggling cigarettes. In the English episode, a lazy poet finds the body of a woman on the downs, and tries to sell his story to the press.

Irene Girard is an ambassador's wife and used to living in luxury. After the dramatic death of her son, she feels guilty of having neglected him and feels compelled to help people in need who cross her path. One day she offers shelter to a man who is evading justice, and she ends being arrested herself. Her husband, for the sake of social propriety, arranges for a doctor to declare her insane. Irene escapes one prison to enter another, and to reflect on what sort of society she lives in.

A middle-aged plumber quits his job and questions his life after seeing somebody his own age suddenly die from a heart attack on his way to work.

In an atmosphere of political tension when the French still control Algiers, an Algerian is killed on the beach and a Frenchman who has lived in Algiers all his life is arrested for the murder. A trial takes place. One of the witnesses was at the funeral of Arthur Meursault's mother. It bothers other mourners and Meursault himself that he showed no emotion when his mother died. His eventful day at the beach takes place shortly after the funeral as he examines what his life has been and what path he should take in the future.

The movie is based on a true story. On 16 March 1978 Aldo Moro, the former Italian Prime Minister was kidnapped in Via Fani by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), a militant Communist Italian group. He was the main supporter of the Compromesso Storico (Hystorical Compromise), which had to lead to the first Italian government supported by both the Christian Democrats and the Communists, in a period of social, economic and political crises. During the attack his five escort agents were all killed. Moro's corpse was found on 9 May 1978 in a car parked in a street between the headquarters of the Christian Democrat Party and the Communist Party. This movie is inspired by this tragic event which traumatize the whole nation. It focuses mainly on the relationship between the prisoner and his guards through the eyes of Chiara, the young woman whose role is to guard the prisoner. The movie portraits Chiara's life (her job as a librarian, the ordinary household) on one side and the political process which is held against Moro by her friends on the other, while they are waiting for a revolution to come. She is drawn between these two aspects and she begins to doubt her political commitment (she cries when she listens to Moro's letter to the Pope). The news tell the people what is going on in Italy (some politicians ask for the death penalty for the kidnappers, the Pope Paul VI appeals to the terrorist for Moro's release). The State will not bend by accepting the conditions established by the terrorists to release the prisoner. The Brigate Rosse sentence Moro to death and the story comes to its tragic end, although the eyes and the heart of the imagination show Aldo Moro walking happy and free in Rome.

Alessandro, a young epileptic with paranoid inclinations, decides to relieve Augusto, the only sound brother, from the burden of a numerous family plagued with hereditary diseases. After a first aborted attempt, the dreadful series of accidents/murders is started by pushing the blind mother into a ravine. Then comes the turn of Leone, the idiotic brother. Will Alessandro be able to bring to completion his obsessive project ?

In a bleak rundown industrial area, young Giuliana tries to cope with life. She's married to Ugo, the manager of a local plant, but is having an affair with one of his co-workers, Corrado Zeller, who is visiting. Giuliana is unstable, not quite knowing anymore whether her role is wife, mother, or just another person in the world. Her escape from life is short-lived: Zeller is just using her to satisfy his own needs and desires.

In a seedy section of Rome, Vittorio Cataldi--"Accattone" ("beggar") to those who know him--lives off the avails of prostitution, Maddalena being his only girl. He is married to Ascenza with who he has young son Iaio, but he does not live with them, provide for them, or play any important role in their lives (they live with her father and brother). He generally hangs out with his similarly-slack friends, playing cards and drinking. His income source is threatened when Maddalena is hit by a motorcyclist, then beaten by rivals of his, which leads to her being arrested and jailed for a year. Largely because of Iaio, Accattone contemplates going straight and getting a real job. Then he meets Stella, an innocent young woman who has had a hard life, but is not as naive as she first appears. Accattone falls in love with her, but as the thought of working a steady job now becomes abhorrent, contemplates pimping for Stella. As Accattone and Stella's relationship progresses, Accattone's past might come back to haunt him.

Poor Sicilian fishermen are exploited by fish wholesalers. One of the families is trying to escape them by being their own bosses and buying their own boat. But nobody helps them, and even the weather and fate are against them. How can they win in a wild world?

In the industrial North, Giovanni is a skilled factory worker offered a promotion if he'll go to Sicily for 18 months to assist in a new department. His impending absence strains his already nearly wordless relationship with Liliana, his fiancée. They meet regularly at a dance hall and sometimes go riding on his motorcycle. We watch him arrive in Sicily, walk the town, live in a hotel, find lodgings, work, and participate in local events. It's a solitary, melancholy life. In his mind's eye he thinks about Liliana. He hasn't been entirely faithful. There's pain and detachment in her eyes. Across this distance, can anything bring about a breakthrough? Do they have a future?

The story of three families living in three apartments in the same bourgeois condominium.

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, even if her husband would prefer they save their little money for the rent instead of paying teachers, hairdressers, or bribes for her illusions.

The film follows the anguish of the four-year-old, Prico, after his mother, Nina, leaves his father, Andrea, for her lover Roberto. Prico is sent to his aunt and then to his grandmother. Nina returns when Prico is sick and vows to give up Roberto, even though he persists in seeing her. The family situation gradually improves until they take a holiday on the Italian Riviera.

In the harsh granite mountains of the center of the island of Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea, an old people live at the town of Orgòsolo. Between the rocks and the oak woods, shepherds attend their flock of sheep like their fore fathers did since prehistoric times. So do Michele and his younger brother Peppeddu that own a few sheep and make a harsh but honest living selling pecorino cheese. One day arrive three bandits on the run with machine guns and stolen pigs that take a rest at Michele's camp site. When the police arrives a day later, they run and kill a policemen in flight. Michele takes his sheep and escapes in the opposite direction and becomes a fugitive. Hunted by the police, while afraid to stand trial and leave his sheep poorly protected by his young brother, Michele decides to take Peppeddu and his flock over the mountains. Half way his sheep die of exhaustion and thirst, leaving the brothers without living so that nothing remains but returning to Orgòsolo. There they hear that Michele has been condemned for conspiracy to murder and that his creditors threaten to sell their house leaving their mother homeless, since no sheep are left to pay the dept. Nothing remains for Michele but to take up a machine gun and rob some sheep, become a bandit himself and leave a fellow shepherd in peril, thus starting a vendetta and a new cycle of violence.

With a fervent yearning for respectability and enough money to buy herself a brand-new life in Rome, the uninhibited, fearless, determined former streetwalker Mamma Roma renounces her ignominious past to reunite with her loafing 16-year-old son Ettore. Free at last from her disgusting pimp and ex-lover Carmine, Roma is bent on making an honest living running a humble vegetable stall, but a malicious extortion scheme and the equally insidious menace of exposure threaten to put an end to her zealous aspirations for a decent bourgeois existence. For his own sake, Ettore must be spared the violence of the adult world; nevertheless, can a lone single mother protect her only son from the same snares that wounded her youth?

After living seven years with the mechanic Aldo and having a daughter with him, simple Irma is informed that her absent husband has just died in Sydney. She becomes upset when Aldo proposes to marry her and informs him she's leaving him. Unable to explain how much he loves her, Aldo takes their daughter Rosina and travels with her, meeting different women in different places, trying to establish a new relationship and fill the emptiness of his sentimental life. He visits his former lover Elvia; he meets and lives with widow Virginia, who owns a gas station; he lives with the prostitute Andreina. But these relationships never complete the needy Aldo.