Movies: Giorgio Bassani

In 1930s Italy, a wealthy Jewish family tries to maintain their privileged lifestyle, hosting friends for tennis and parties at their villa. As anti-Semitism intensifies under Fascism, they must ultimately face the horrors of the Holocaust....

A troubled and neurotic Italian Countess betrays her entire country for a self-destructive love affair with an Austrian Lieutenant....

When peasant girl Nives is deserted by smuggler Gino Lodi, she betrays him to the police. Police officer Enzo Cinti, who loves Nives, traces her to the Po River cane-fields, where she is working as a cutter to support herself and an infant son, and w...

Jewish lovers (Rupert Everett, Stefania Sandrelli) and a homosexual doctor (Philippe Noiret) fall to prejudice and scandal in 1938 Italy....

During the fascist era, Adriana a beautiful young model, becomes a prostitute after a love affair gone wrong. She meets Mino, a partisan who falls in love with her and wants to redeem her....

The ever-growing popularity of Gina Lollobrigida was a decided box-office asset when the Italian La Provinciale was distributed to the U.S. as The Wayward Wife. Lollobrigida acquits herself quite nicely in the tensely dramatic role of a much-put-upon...

A film made up of four episodes: a jar repairer gets trapped in a vat because of his hunch; a young unmarried mother is forced to beg to buy herself a fan; Rosario Chiarchiaro appears before a law court for casting spells; the discomfort of an overti...

Documentary footage (from the 1950s) and accompanying commentary to attempt to answer the existential question, Why are our lives characterized by discontent, anguish, and fear? The film is in two completely separate parts, and the directors of these...

Three gorgeous seamstresses meet on the historic steps of the Piazza de Spagna in Rome to discuss one another's love lives....

1943. The affair between Anna, unhappily married to wheelchair-bound Pino, and deserter Franco unfolds in foggy Ferrara, intertwining with the power struggle taking place within local Fascist ranks that culminates in a massacre of civilians, includin...

Eight-year-old Roger Court is in Venice expecting to reunite with his father, British diplomat Major Court (Trevor Howard), whom he hasn't seen in three years. Roger lives with his Aunt Rose since his mother abandoned him....

Nine episodes about life in Italy in the period just before its economic boom....

An attempt to reconstruct the complete version of Pier Paolo Pasolini's segment of La rabbia....

Mandrin, the French army deserter, becomes the leader of a gang of smugglers in Piedmont. He is loved by the beautiful innkeeper Rosetta but draws attention to the Marquise de Montbricourt, favorite of the king, who comes from Versailles just to see ...

Villa Borghese, Rome's biggest urban park, is the place where everyday laughs and dramas are consumed. The movie is made of six vignettes set there....

Once upon a time there was a garden, a refuge, a safe haven - 'The Garden of the Finzi Continis'. It came to life in Giorgio Bassani's 1962 semi-autobiographical novel recounting an unfulfilled love story between two young Jews in Ferrara, while fasc...

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