The Hand of God

Naples, early 1980s. The strained marriage between Aldo and Vanda is fractured one evening when Aldo admits, unprompted, his infidelity. Equally hurt and bewildered, Vanda attempts to hide her pain from the couple's two school-age kids, lest they discover that their cramped apartment is not a home of trust and love. 30 years later, Aldo and Vanda are still tied together, but their relationship with each other and their children continues to be defined by what happened all those years ago.

Carlo and Elisa are a successful couple. He’s a university professor and writer facing a creative block; she’s a brilliant, sharp-witted journalist, known for her internationally published editorials. They live in Rome, moving between accomplishments and routine, affection and something that might be fading. In search of new energy, they travel to Morocco with their lifelong friends, Anna and Paolo, and their thirteen-year-old daughter Vittoria—bright, curious, a little eccentric. Tensions soon rise.

A gang of teenage boys stalk the streets of Naples armed with hand guns and AK-47s to do their mob bosses' bidding – until they decide to be the bosses themselves.

After years spent working as a prostitute in her Italian village, middle-aged Mamma Roma has saved enough money to buy herself a fruit stand so that she can have a respectable middle-class life and reestablish contact with the 16-year-old son she abandoned when he was an infant. But her former pimp threatens to expose her sordid past, and her troubled son seems destined to fall into a life of crime and violence.

When Elvis Valderez is honourably discharged from the Navy, he heads to the small Texas town of Corpus Christi, where he introduces himself to Pastor David Sandow, his long-lost father, soon becoming a stalwart member of the church.

In a small suburb on the outskirts of Rome, the cheerful heat of summer camouflages a stifling atmosphere of alienation. From a distance, the families seem normal, but it’s an illusion: in the houses, courtyards and gardens, silence shrouds the subtle sadism of the fathers, the passivity of the mothers and the guilty indifference of adults. But it’s the desperation and repressed rage of the children that will explode and cut through this grotesque façade, with devastating consequences for the entire community.

An aging soccer fanatic faces down the reality of his past while struggling to give himself and a young follower very different futures.

The Guerrasio family and friends gather to celebrate Claudio and Carmela’s oldest daughter’s 18th birthday. There is a healthy rivalry between the birthday girl and her 15-year-old sister Chiara as they compete on the dancefloor. It is a happy occasion, and the close-knit family are on top form. However, everything changes the next day when the father disappears. Chiara, unconvinced by the cover story, starts to investigate. As she gets closer to the truth, she is forced to decide what kind of future she wants for herself.

12-year-old Renato experiences three significant events on the same day: the beginning of the Second World War, getting a bike, and witnessing the arrival of the gorgeous Malèna. Through his eyes, we see the curse of beauty and loneliness of Malena, whose husband is presumed dead, and, through his soul, we see his love for her.

Emma has left Russia to live with her husband in Italy. Now a member of a powerful industrial family, she is the respected mother of three, but feels unfulfilled. One day, Antonio, a talented chef and her son's friend, makes her senses kindle.

In the immediate post-war period, amidst the rubble of a poverty-ridden Naples, two kids, Carmine and Celestina, try to survive as best they can by helping each other out. One night, they secretly board a ship bound for New York to reach Celestina’s sister, who emigrated to America several years earlier. The two children join the many Italian emigrants seeking a new life in America and arrive in an unknown metropolis, which, after several misadventures, they will learn to call home.

A young Roman woman during the 1950s is on the verge of becoming engaged to a man. She goes to Cinecittà to do an audition as an extra and is thrust into this almost infinite night during which she discovers herself.

In 1988, a teenage girl's life is thrown into chaos when her mother disappears.

After moving to a new town, troublemaking teen Jim Stark is supposed to have a clean slate, although being the new kid in town brings its own problems. While searching for some stability, Stark forms a bond with a disturbed classmate, Plato, and falls for local girl Judy. However, Judy is the girlfriend of neighborhood tough, Buzz. When Buzz violently confronts Jim and challenges him to a drag race, the new kid's real troubles begin.

A small-time hood must choose from among love, friendship and the chance to rise within the mob.

Peppino, a retired hitman for the Camorra, has now fully passed on his job and know-how to his single son, Nino. But when Nino is brutally assassinated, the old man is back in business to take revenge. Aside his everlasting love Rita and his longtime henchman Totò, Peppino will go to any lengths, even if it means bringing the Camorra down.

Lugano, Switzerland. Titta Di Girolamo is a discreet and sullen man who has been living for almost a decade in a modest hotel room, a prisoner of an atrocious routine, apparently without purpose. His past is a mystery, nobody knows what he does for a living, he answers indiscreet questions evasively. What secrets does this enigmatic man hide?

A lack of parental guidance encourages teens in an affluent California town to rebel with substance abuse and casual sex.

Elisa is only forty when an incurable disease takes her from her husband and their daughter. Before her heart stops, Elisa finds a way to stay close to her: a gift for every birthday up to her adult age, 18 gifts to try to accompany her child's growth year after year.

An aimless young man who is scalping tickets, gambling and drinking, agrees to coach a Little League team from the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago as a condition of getting a loan from a friend.

A year in the life of a turn-of-the-century middle class family, leading up to the opening of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

A couple of high school graduates spend one final night cruising the strip with their buddies before they go off to college.

Apu and his family have moved away from the country to live in the bustling holy city of Benares. As he progresses from wide-eyed child to intellectually curious teenager, eventually studying in Kolkata, we witness his academic and moral education, as well as the growing complexity of his relationship with his mother.

Bruce Springsteen, a young musician on the cusp of global superstardom, struggles to reconcile the pressures of success with the ghosts of his past.

About sixteen-year-old Susanne and her relationship with her parents and friends. To make her friend Peter jealous, she flirts heavily with a forty-year-old silversmith from the sailing club where she works.

A wealthy New York investment banking executive hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he escalates deeper into his illogical, gratuitous fantasies.

The story of the Buckman family and friends, attempting to bring up their children. They suffer/enjoy all the events that occur: estranged relatives, the 'black sheep' of the family, the eccentrics, the skeletons in the closet, and the rebellious teenagers.

A couple's attitudes are challenged when their daughter brings home a fiancé who is black.

New Jersey teen Daniel LaRusso moves to Los Angeles with his mother, and soon strikes up a relationship with Ali. He quickly finds himself the target of bullying by a group of thugs, led by Ali's ex-boyfriend Johnny, who study karate at the Cobra Kai dojo under ruthless sensei John Kreese. Fortunately, Daniel befriends Mr. Miyagi, an unassuming repairman who just happens to be a martial arts master himself. Miyagi takes Daniel under his wing, training him in a more compassionate form of karate for self-defense and, later, preparing him to compete against the brutal Cobra Kai.

In the years before World War II, a penniless Japanese child is torn from her family to work as a maid in a geisha house.

37-year-old Italian-American widow Loretta Castorini believes she is unlucky in love, and so accepts a marriage proposal from her boyfriend Johnny, even though she doesn't love him. When she meets his estranged younger brother Ronny, an emotional and passionate man, she finds herself drawn to him. She tries to resist, but Ronny, who blames his brother for the loss of his hand, has no scruples about aggressively pursuing her while Johnny is out of the country. As Loretta falls for Ronny, she learns that she's not the only one in her family with a secret romance.

When a young boy makes a wish at a carnival machine to be big, he wakes up the following morning to find that it has been granted and his body has grown older overnight, but he is still the same 13-year-old boy inside. Now he must learn how to cope with the unfamiliar world of grown-ups, including getting a job and having his first romantic encounter with a woman.

A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.

Nancy Savoca’s second student film follows two twelve-year olds, Bobby (Joey D’Arelli) and Denise (Kelly Cinnante) who run away to Hollywood. They land at an open mic night in a New Jersey bar where Bobby’s aunt and uncle (once aspiring actors) lay out the realities of life as a working actor. The film was inspired by performers Savoca met while making her first student film, most notably William DaPrato. Filled with wry humor and quiet revelations about the pursuit of artistic dreams, Bad Timing also features Marianne Leone and the on-screen debut of future Academy Award winner Chris Cooper.

Mexican beauty Camilla hopes to rise above her station by marrying a wealthy American. That is complicated by meeting Arturo Bandini, a first-generation Italian hoping to land a writing career and a blue-eyed blonde on his arm.

In 1980, the black Falashas in Ethiopia are recognised as genuine Jews and are secretly carried to Israel. The day before the transport the son of a Jewish mother dies. In his place and with his name (Schlomo) she takes a Christian 9-year-old boy.

A SILENT STORY - An aging refugee clown in Paris masks trauma with silent street performances. Beneath his painted smile lie resilience and displacement’s sorrow, a wordless elegy to those surviving unseen.

A teenage skateboarder becomes suspected of being connected with a security guard who suffered a brutal death in a skate park called "Paranoid Park".

The story is set at the beginning of the 20th century in Sicily. Salvatore, a very poor farmer, and a widower, decides to emigrate to the US with all his family, including his old mother. Before they embark, they meet Lucy. She is supposed to be a British lady and wants to come back to the States. Lucy, or Luce as Salvatore calls her, for unknown reasons wants to marry someone before to arrive to Ellis Island in New York. Salvatore accepts the proposal. Once they arrive in Ellis Island they spend the quarantine period trying to pass the examinations to be admitted to the States. Tests are not so simple for poor farmers coming from Sicily. Their destiny is in the hands of the custom officers.