2 July 2025
Cinecittà 4th Doc Season at London Bertha’s DocHouse
'The Castle', 'Gen_' and 'Bestiares, Herbaria, Lapidaries' to be screened during the programme in the English capital

Running 5 – 6 July 2025 at London’s Bertha DocHouse, the 4th Cinecittà Italian Doc Season will comprise three remarkable documentaries that break boundaries and challenge expectations. Bertha DocHouse began in October 2002 as a weekly screening programme showing brilliant international documentaries at cinemas around London. In 2010, they joined forces with Bertha Foundation, and in March 2015 we were able to open the Bertha DocHouse screen, a 55-seat dedicated documentary cinema housed in the Curzon Bloomsbury.
Acclaimed at international film festivals including Sundance, Venice, Amsterdam’s IDFA, and Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX, one is an epic and enthralling docu-encyclopaedia exploring life’s essential elements, one is a powerful yet simply done human-interest story, and one is a beautifully inobtrusive observational documentary. Although each film follows its own path, altogether they challenge our concept of the craft of documentary filmmaking. Source material ranges from first-person interviews to precious archive material sourced from the Istituto Luce film archive (preserved and curated by Cinecittà, this immense archive of Italy’s film and photographic heritage celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2024). The result is a season of poetic, absorbing, and genre-defying works of nonfiction. Each screening will be accompanied by a Q&A with the filmmakers.
“The Italian documentary, in all its different creative and productive forms, has become one of the most emerging original genres in our country, conquering festivals worldwide with a new generation of authors,” says Enrico Bufalini, director of Archivo Luce-Cinecittà. “Cinecittà, the leading producer and distributor of Italian documentaries, has the mission of promoting them internationally. The collaboration with the prestigious Bertha DocHouse is a significant documentary review, bringing to the British audience a selection of documentaries focused on the diversity and vibrancy of Italian reality cinema. A new generation of filmmakers has reinterpreted the legacy of great Italian realism, leading it into a more contemporary and visionary dimension. The 4th Italian Doc Season will bring to the British audience a new wave of outstanding independent cinema.”
Jenny Horwell, Bertha DocHouse director and programmer, adds: “We’re excited to continue celebrating Italian non-fiction through this now well-established collaboration with Cinecittà. The upcoming 4th edition of the Italian Doc Season represents a rich programme of empathetic, observational cinema and extremely fine filmmaking, which we think audiences will love discovering.”
The 4th edition of Cinecittà Italian Doc Season comprises the UK Premiere of The Castle, directed by Danny Biancardi, Stefano La Rosa and Virginia Nardelli (Italy/France). Nominated for the CPH:DOX Award, this observational documentary follows four 11-year-olds who live in an old, struggling neighbourhood in Palermo. The children explore an abandoned kindergarten: a place believed to be haunted so everyone avoids it and uses it as a dump – but they decide to transform one of its abandoned rooms into their secret hideaway. This becomes a safe space where they can escape the gaze of others, share their fears, and let their imagination run free without feeling judged. The screening is scheduled for Saturday 5 July at 3:30pm.
That same day at 6 p.m., the event will feature the London premiere of Gen_, directed by Gianluca Matarrese (Italy, France, Switzerland) and co-written with Donatella Della Ratta. What do women and men who dream of having a child have in common with those who seek to reconcile their assigned gender with their gender identity? A champion at Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival and nominated for the “World Cinema: Documentary Grand Jury Prize” at Sundance, it follows a maverick doctor at a Milan hospital who champions fertility treatments and gender transitions, defying both government restrictions and corporate interests in a quest to help patients realize their true selves.
Finally, the UK Premiere of Bestiares, Herbaria, Lapidaries, directed by Massimo d’Anolfi and Martina Parenti (Italy/Switzerland), will take place on the Sunday. Divided into three acts – animals, plants, stones – this epic docu-encyclopaedia explores life’s essential elements through distinct storytelling styles. Each of the three segments is a tribute to a specific genre of documentary filmmaking. Built around archive footage, the first part sees scholars analyse the recording and classification of animals and their behaviour. The second, shot in the botanical gardens of Padua in Italy, argues that plants surpass and overshadow humans in almost every respect. The third act reflects on the role stones play in war and destruction, as well as in commemoration. Having premiered at Venice and IDFA, this poetic and visually beautiful film encapsulates often overlooked yet integral aspects of our existence on Earth. The screening will start at 3pm and it will include a 15min comfort break after act two.
With the 1924-2024 centenary anniversary of Istituto Luce (today Cinecittà) still ongoing, a full year of celebration is concluding with special tributes to the Istituto Luce film archive: the film and photographic archive that is registered by UNESCO in their “Memory of the World Programme”. Each screening in the Cinecittà 4th Italian Doc Season will be preceded by a short package of rare and precious film footage combined with behind-the-scenes photographs – The School Dance, The Singing Babies, The Salamander – all especially chosen from the archive to complement the films in this season.