Franco Maresco

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

The program consists of clips featuring interviews conducted by the two directors with alienated, crazy, and squalid characters against the backdrop of a desolate Sicily. A characteristic feature is the black and white footage. The subjects are all strictly male: there is no place for femininity in absolute squalor and desolation.

Palermo, Sicily, Italy, 2017. Twenty-five years after the murders of anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone, on May 23, 1992, and Paolo Borsellino, on July 19, 1992; and on the occasion of the tributes held in memory of both heroes, skeptical photographer Letizia Battaglia, chronicler of their titanic combat, criticizes the opportunism of shady characters who, like businessman Ciccio Mira, profit from the commemoration of both tragedies.

Ciprì and Maresco's delicious documentary portrays Sicilian super-agent Enzo Castagna, a man with some 20,000 extras on his books, who has worked with the likes of Loren, Pasolini, Rosi, Coppola and Cimino (indeed, virtually anyone who's ever chosen to film in Palermo). It's typically weird, witty and wonderful, partly due to its subject, a self-styled 'little big man' who consents to be described as 'almighty' and 'the greatest contributor to Italian cinema in the last 35 years'. The local favourite has also done time for bribery, but refuses to comment on Cosa Nostra. The film is as astonishing as its subject. Shot in luscious b/w, it's driven forward by an offscreen interrogator who alternates between ludicrously hyperbolic flattery and forthright questions about corruption and crime. It also serves as a study of the way ethics get abandoned in the unending pursuit of fame, wealth and self-esteem.

No description available.

In Roberta Torre's "true story of Romeo and Julet", Toni Giulietto is a vulnerable street singer and Little Tony-impersonator (who is himself an Italian Elvis-impersonator) who is constantly deceived and hoodwinked by almost everyone he knows. Romea is an attractive Nigerian immigrant who sells sex on the streets of Palermo to pay off her huge fee to the man who smuggled her in to the country. Various characters plot against each other and the plots, which draw in people from all the different social strata, spiral out of control as the tug-of-war between these different factions of Sicilian society is fought to the last.

In the Sicily of the late 1940s, two brother sculptors, tired of selling madonnas to the local churches, finally realize their dream, and set up a Sicilian production company, thanks to the help of a local bishop. They start producing one box-office failure Z-movie after the other, all with terribly bad local non-pros as actors. Covered in debts, they finally have their great chance, when a local nobleman obsessed by magic decides to invest all his wealth in the making of a movie about Cagliostro, just one year after Orson Welles' Black Magic (1949). They hire a famous American actor (Robert Englund) and start shooting "The Return of Cagliostro".

This film tells the story of three defeats: Berlusconi’s political and human defeat in his “twilight”, the one of Ciccio Mirra, Berlusconi’s unconditional supporter, deeply rooted in an ancient culture that dies hard, and the director’s artistic defeat in an Italy that recognised itself in this “Berlusconian culture” for a long time, and probably still does.

No description available.

Filming on Franco Maresco's film about Carmelo Bene is abruptly halted after yet another on-set accident. Producer Andrea Occhipinti pulls the plug, exasperated by the endless takes and repeated delays. Angered, the director simply disappears. Maresco's friend, Umberto Cantone, attempts to mend the rift by calling witnesses from all those involved in the project, in an investigation that offers an opportunity to retrace the personality and ideas of the most corrosive and apocalyptic auteur in Italian cinema.

The film has three stories. First is about local village idiot Paletta, who can not afford the services of a whore and so steals a locket from a holy shrine belonging to local mafia don. Second shows the story of betrayal of Pitrinu (who's dead now) by his lover Fefe. Final episode is about lowlife Lazarus. He is killed by mob boss Toto, but raised from the dead by a local messiah, who is also known as Toto (and is played by same actor).

Franco Maresco celebrates the heritage of Pier Paolo Pasolini on the 99th anniversary of his birth through a series of exchanges with renowned intellectuals which were involved or influenced by his works and ideas.

No description available.

No description available.

The Italian duo Ciprì & Maresco, known to be cynical deconstructionists, weave a fascinating film around memories of a decadent Sicily. Ruins, memories of ruins - memories are ruins. This thoroughly surrealist piece unfolds like a dream, with no clear direction but the haunting feeling of familiarity and the ready acceptance of otherness as oneness.

No description available.

"I migliori nani" simulates the television programs that have dominated much of Italian programming since the 1990s: a studio and a series of what in conventional television would be called "reports," but which are actually excursions into a twisted, mutilated, and discordant world.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.