Francesco Falaschi’s delightful comedy takes us on a culinary road trip to Florence, culminating in a contest for young cooks. Arturo (Vinicio Marchioni) is a veteran chef with minor anger management problems who, after a short stint in prison, performs community service at a school for teens with Asperger’s. His students are eager to learn, especially Guido (Luigi Fedele), a young man who remembers every ingredient in every recipe. At first, the jaded Arturo views Guido as an obligation, but the boy’s earnest enthusiasm rubs off on his mentor. Arturo delays his move to Milan to cook in a sleek restaurant when the opportunity arises to accompany Guido to the competition in Tuscany’s capital. Complicating matters is the fact that the president of the jury is Daniel Marinari (Nicola Siri), Arturo’s celebrity chef ex-business partner and the man Arturo considers responsible for his previous troubles. As Arturo confronts his past and Guido faces the pressure of competition, their in

Matteo Olivetti and Andrea Carpenzano turn in stellar performances as Mirko and Manolo, best friends who live with their single parents in a tough neighborhood of a Roman suburb. They are still in school, training to be caterers or barmen or something useful, and making minimum wage delivering pizzas. An accident sets off a chain of events, propelling them from good-natured, roughhousing buddies to thugs on the bottom rung of the local gang’s ladder, facing increasingly difficult choices. Their new level of income and what it buys is intoxicating at first; they share dreams of women and clothes and fancy sneakers. Manolo’s father helps them on the road to illegal activities and takes pride in his son’s new position; while Mirko’s mother suffers as she watches the son she loves slip away into a murky world of crime and immorality. The Innocenzo Brothers’ tale of two young men with few economic choices is nuanced and riveting.

THE CALL (La Convocazione) and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC (Aperti al Pubblico), Two award-winning documentaries from Festival dei Popoli The festival is proud to close with two outstanding documentaries that won awards at Italy’s prestigious documentary film festival, Festival dei Popoli: THE CALL, directed by Enrico Maisto and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, directed by Silvia Bellotti. Director Silvia Bellotti will attend the Closing Night Screening. The Closing Night screening will also include the announcement of the festival’s City of Florence Award for the best feature film in competition. man can change his life by trying to change the world. The whole world, one step at a time.

Isidoro (Nicola Nocella), known to everyone as Easy, is lonely and depressed. His career as a go-kart driver is over because he gained so much weight that he’s not able to get into the seat any more. When Taras, a Ukrainian worker, dies while working on a building project for Easy’s brother Filo, Easy gets a chance for a fresh start behind the steering wheel. Filo gives his sibling the seemingly simple assignment of driving Taras in his coffin from Italy to his home village in the Carpathians, a journey which turns out to be complicated and epic. Easy sets off with GPS, an apple, a smart phone set to translate from Hungarian to Italian, and a winter coat from his mother. The hearse is soon stolen, but Easy remains steadfast in his promise to deliver Taras to his resting place, hitching a ride with the wooden box, putting it on a tractor, and even floating down a river astride the coffin. Easy was nominated for Best Actor and Best New Director at the David di Donatello Awards and

Milan at night: three young friends drive through the dark streets of Milan in a black SUV, a recent gift to Cosimo (Yuri Casagrande Conti), from his father. Eager to live up to his aspired bravura, Cosimo suddenly stops the car near a park where he and his buddies attack a random passer-by—in a frenzy of blows and imagined power. The aftermath of the attack impacts each of the friends differently: Cosimo tries to avoid the police; Giovanni (Gil Giuliani), struggling with the shadow of his famous photographer father even as he follows his path, applies to graduate school in photography; and Riccardino, (Claudia Veronesi), the quintessential tag-along, pretends to be a friend of the victim—motivated by a combination of guilt and morbid curiosity. The real protagonist of the film is the vague emptiness that crosses the faces and bodies of these young men. Their exploits are daring and wild and fuel their desire to experience life, but they’ve lost their moral compasses among Milan’s gla

A crooked producer dupes five hopeful Italians into traveling to Armenia to shoot a film. Nicola (Giuseppe Battiston) a rumpled history teacher, can’t believe his script will actually be produced. He travels to Armenia with a ragtag cast and crew, unaware that he is really part of a scam to get European Union funding. Franco Paradiso, the nefarious producer, sets the gullible Nicola up with Valeria (Barbora Bobulova), a Russian-Italian location scout, and Patrizia (Silvia D’Amico), an actress Franco “discovered” on the street. Rounding out the motley crew are Elio (Claudio Amendola), an electrician who has never worked on a film; and Sergio (Luca Argentero), a handsome cinematographer on the lam from mobsters. This fine ensemble cast shines when a civil war maroons the group for months in what was supposed to be a shooting location, the secluded, wintry Hotel Gagarin. There, they find unexpected opportunities for creativity and happiness, fashioning short films based on the dreams of

Walter Bencini’s beautifully shot documentary, a love song to the Maremma region of Italy, profiles the butteri, or cowboys, who work on one of the last ranches that breeds cattle and horses in the wild. Shot over the changing seasons in an area that stretches between southern Tuscany and northern Lazio, the film chronicles the lives of these amiable weather-beaten wranglers, their synchronicity with the rhythms of the land, and their relationship with the animals they steward. From the veteran cowpoke who doesn’t want to be known as one of the last of a breed, to the young men who are learning the trade and wondering if there is enough money in riding the range to support a family, The Last Cowboys celebrates the camaraderie of this rugged band. For anyone who loves the Tuscan countryside or simply seeks escape from everyday office routine, this film’s exquisite lensing provides a close-up of sweeping vistas of the Tyrrhenian Sea, bucolic shots of cows (and the cowboys r

Antonio Padovan’s witty thriller unravels on the rolling hills of Valdobbiadene (in the Veneto region of northern Italy), where Prosecco grapes grow. Adapted from Fulvio Ervas’s eponymous novel, The Last Prosecco features a winemaking count (Rade Serbedzija), who is fighting to protect his terroir, and a Persian-Italian police inspector (Giuseppe Battiston), who is stubborn and perspicacious. The Last Prosecco has all of the elements of a good whodunit: politics, greed, multiple murders, and a cast of potential culprits, including the count’s mistress (Silvia D’Amico), his estranged South American daughter (Liz Solari), and his longtime housekeeper (Giselle Burinato). Throw into the mix the manager of a polluting cement plant and a crazy man who scrapes the rust from the tombs in the cemetery, and you’ve got a detective story with fizz. Antonio Padovan’s thriller explores the lure of the vineyards, the effervescence of bubbles, and the conflict between those who are driven to e

At 18, after a five-year sojourn, Manuel (Andrea Lattanzi) leaves the education center where he was placed after his mother (Francesca Antonelli) was jailed. Upon his release, he is unusually focused on his main objective: to get the two remaining years of his mother’s sentence commuted to house arrest. In order to free her, he must present himself to the authorities as the responsible adult; able to watch over his mother, hold down a job, and keep a tidy home. Mature beyond his years, Manuel also senses he is on the brink of his own life, one that will be constrained if he shoulders the legal responsibility for his parent. Shot in a neorealist style by former documentary filmmaker Dario Albertini —making his dramatic feature film debut—Manuel features a stand out performance by Andrea Lattanzi as a sweet young man who desperately wants to do the right thing. Manuel was a triple winner at the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival (Best Film, Critics' Prize, and Student