Director Yuri Ancarani crosses the Persian Gulf to accompany a falconer to an important competition, entering the surreal world of wealthy Qatari sheikhs with a passion for amateur falconry. The opulence of this Middle Eastern gas state is on full display as the men race SUVs up and down sand dunes, fly their prized falcons around on private jets, and take their pet cheetahs out for desert spins in their souped-up Ferraris.

The Challenge

Children’s drawings made during complicated visits to their parents. For them San Vittore is a castle.  San Vittore is an episode of the series The Roots of Violence which is also composed by:  San Siro (2014)  San Giorgio (2019)

San Vittore

Daniele is a young man from Sant’Erasmo, an island on the edges of the Venice Lagoon. He lives on his wits, isolated even from his peer group who are busy exploring an existence of pleasure-seeking expressed in the cult of the barchino (motorboat). This obsession focuses on the building of ever more powerful engines to transform the little lagoon launches into dangerously fast racing boats. Daniele too dreams of a record-breaking barchino, one that will take him to the top of the leader board, but everything he does to further his dream and win respect from the others turns out to be tragically counterproductive. The decline that erodes the relationships, environment and habits of a rootless generation is observed from the timeless perspective of the Venetian landscape and its island outskirts: the point of no return is a foolish, vestigial tale of male initiation. Violent and destined to fail, it explodes dragging the ghost city along on a psychedelic shipwreck.

Atlantis

The film highlights the relationship between women’s growing social empowerment and the rise in sexual abuse by men – a trend that was the opposite of what was largely expected to happen. The film revolves around Marina Valcarenghi, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst with a forty-five-year career in clinical work that has allowed her to observe the persistence of women’s insecurity, despite the economic and social independence they have gradually achieved, and understand why. Valcarenghi was the first to introduce psychoanalysis in prisons, starting with the Opera and Bollate penitentiaries. For twelve years she worked with male inmates held in solitary confinement; most of them had been convicted of sexual violence.