Paolo Benvenuti

An unconventional biopic about the legendary Tuscan bandit Tiburzi, who became a peasants' hero in the late nineteenth century

While Puccini is totally engrossed with the composition of his opera La fanciulla del West, sexual intrigue swirls around him.

On the first of May 1947, the bandit Salvatore Giuliano conducted a raid to the mountain pass Portella della Ginestra, with a view to capturing Sicily's most prominent communist, Giacomo Licausi. What actually happened was a regular massacre, leaving fourteen people dead and more than thirty wounded. In 1951, about a year after Giulano's violent death, his men are tried in Viterbo. Unconvinced by the official version, Gaspare Pasciotta's lawyer, decides to travel to Sicily and starts investigating the facts.

Taken from the four canonical Gospels and the seven apocryphal Gospels, the film starts from a basic idea: the betrayal by Judas was an act essential to the mission of Christ and the salvation of humanity.

Recreating a historical event that occurred in Rome on November 24, 1736, the film tells the story of two Jews who are arrested for burglary, tortured, and forced to confess. The Papal Tribunal sentences them to death by hanging.

The trial of a woman in San Miniato accused of witchcraft in 1594.

In the village of Buti, on Monte Pisano, oral tradition preserves the memory of a type of popular theater known as Maggio, which died out around 1952, the year of the death of one of its last directors, Angiòlo Bernardini, who passed away at the age of 82. The director, with the help of the old prompter, handwritten notes on the scripts, and the actors of yesteryear, now elderly, attempts to stage this theater again, recited and sung in octosyllabic quatrains.

Paolo Benvenuti's film recounts the fifteen long years of siege inflicted on a group of citizens of Pisa during the war that pitted the cities of Florence and Pisa against each other from 1494 to 1509.

Made in 1968, within the framework of the activities of the Cinemazero collective, Il balla balla could be regarded as Benvenuti’s own The Big Shave (1967, Martin Scorsese). Influenced by the manners of underground cinema, it provides a timeless indictment of the political and economical exploitation of youths.