Open Roads: New Italian Cinema is the only screening series to offer North American audiences a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. This year’s edition, running from June 1 to 8, again strikes a balance between emerging talents and esteemed veterans; commercial and independent fare; and outrageous comedies, gripping dramas, and captivating documentaries.
The opening-night screening is Francesca Archibugi’s latest feature The Hummingbird, adapted from Sandro Veronesi’s Strega Prize-winning novel, an at once epic and intimate chronicle of love and familial ups and downs that spans six decades and three generations, featuring Pierfrancesco Favino, Berenice Bejo, Laura Morante, Nanni Moretti, and others.
Additional offerings for this year’s edition include but are not limited to: Gianni Amelio’s masterfully executed Lord of the Ants, a deeply stirring biopic of the poet/playwright Aldo Braibanti; Roberto Andò’s 12th feature Strangeness, which stars Toni Servillo as Nobel Prize-winning playwright Luigi Pirandello, who, on a trip to his native Sicily in 1920, encounters a pair of gravediggers/aspiring actors and unexpectedly arrives at the idea for what will ultimately become his signature work; actress Monica Dugo’s directorial feature Like Turtles, a tragicomic chronicle of a family’s dissolution about a woman who, her husband having abruptly left her and their children behind, climbs into her wardrobe and refuses to come out; Michele Vannucci’s second feature Delta, set on the Po Delta in northern Italy, where tensions are rising among the small community that calls it home, especially between a lifelong native fisherman (Alessandro Borghi) and a wildlife warden (Luigi Lo Cascio); Paolo Virzi’s Dry, a wryly satirical ensemble drama (with a top-notch cast including Silvio Orlando, Valerio Mastandrea, Monica Bellucci, and others) about the vanity of humans in the face of global catastrophe during an imagined three-year drought; and Giuseppe Fiorello’s debut feature Fireworks, based on a true story set in Sicily in 1982, which turns a budding romance between two teenage boys into a moving examination of the painful moments that produce political change.
This year’s presentation includes a focus on Mario Martone, one of the key Italian filmmakers of the past 40 years, who has completed 17 features since his 1992 theatrical feature debut Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician. Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà pay homage to Martone (a perennial presence in the Open Roads lineup) by showcasing his most recent fiction film, Nostalgia, alongside two essential works from earlier in his career: 1995’s Troubling Love (co-written with Elena Ferrante) and 2014’s Leopardi.
Co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà. Organized by Dan Sullivan of Film at Lincoln Center and by Monique Catalino, Carla Cattani, Griselda Guerrasio,  and Rossella Rinaldi of Cinecittà, Rome.
Open Roads is supported in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in NY and with the support of Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò NYU, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.