Italian Film Festival 2026

Gli occhi dela altri/The Eyes of Others.

Usually a high point on the year's film-going, the 2026 Italian Film Festival has been pretty subdued this year. That's not to say that there isn't something to blow socks off in the titles I've yet to see. 

So far, and not surprisingly, the most imposing item is  a documentary from Giuseppe Tornatore, where he injects the warmth and filmcraft of his Cinema Paradiso or The Legend of 1900 into Brunello, il visionario garbato/Brunello, the Gracious Visionary, a self-produced account of Brunello Cucinelli, “The King of Cashmere” 

Now I’d never heard of Cucinelli, and Wikipedia wasn’t any help, though the Net does point me towards a range of his name-brand high fashion products. Well, Italian couture house heads are getting these movie portraits. Georgio Amani has one in this event, so why not? Tornatore has been here before - a Dolce & Gabbana TV special and his Ennio (Morricone) is a high point in movie portrait making.

The new film is a curious animal -  closer to Melania or Le vent des amoureux, that Lamorisse all-aerial shot tribute to the Shah of Persia, but given a genuine fascination by turning loose a cash-up Tornatore and his top-flight feature technicians to wander between actuality (insert depositions by Oprah, Catholic dignitaries, Patrick Dempsey, Chinese movie star Tao Liu) and its opening reconstruction of early twentieth-century agrarian sharecropper life evolving to a vision of the ideal industrial community, “ Capitalist Humanism.”

We start off in an Italian rural community with “no power, no water, no radio, no papers” and land owner Andrea Scanio Santucci patting the kids on the head and telling them to avoid school and work in the fields with their parents. They ignore this, making the long daily journeys on foot to acquire an education. This basic existence is given a folklorico appeal -  the traditionally dressed women shearing white angora rabbits for their wool or young Francesco Cannevale's Brunello, racing through the golden crops trailng a kite made from stripped umbrellas. However, his father wants a better life and moves the family to the city, where they may have technical advances but his son sees him ground down by the soulless factory routine. Rather than this Brunello, now Saul Nanni, becomes part of the society of the local cafe, mastering card games that are a motif in the film and listening to the philosophy discussion of the priests and student drinkers. There is a great and irrelevant scene of him taking a simple-minded friend to enjoy the spectacle of a passing train.

Brunello - Cristian Stelluti 

Marriage to a girl from neighboring Solomeo village puts our hero into mogul  mode on credit,  introducing color into then-severe cashmere clothing and successfully manipulating the fashion industry to the point where he puts his company on the stock market, flattens the old windowless Solomeo factories and turns their land into a Marienbad-worthy park, dedicating twenty percent of the profits to restoring handsome historic buildings, his local church prominent.  

One can’t cast an admiring eye on Tornatore’s lyrical filmmaking without remembering that his on-screen narrator has bankrolled the whole piece and there he is, shown at ease lighting up buckets of fire wood to drive scavenging bats off from the grapevines, strolling among the piles of books he has bought for the community library and chatting at ease, surrounded by his woolly goats. It would be nice to believe the two-hour-plus warm glow generated reflects a real life triumph of Humanistic Capitalism (think “Major Barbara” without the cynicism) but all the on-screen know-how can’t stop us remembering that it is being bought and paid for.

Director Stefano Mordini's La lezione/The Lesson has promise which, I have to agree with its home market critics, is not sustained to the fade out. What starts intriguingly as a legal drama, when professor Stefano Accorsi’s rape trial accuser abruptly drops the allegation in the courtroom, where the expresive Matilda De Angelis is conducting his defence. Matilda is under stress, having just learned that an old flame, she had put away for stalking, is out of the slammer and finding that her firm is hard up and wants to take on Accorsi’s action against his university for not supporting him, though he’s been re-instated.

This is all conducted against the striking and unfamiliar background of Trieste (staging a regatta), shot in the dim images that I normally dislike but fit this one’s paranoia and threat nicely. It comes elaborated by the musical number she has deleted from her file because it is associated with the former boy friend, the theft of her red scarf, the information her cop friend confirms from police files and having to spend her weekend in her parents' woodland home, now isolated by a landslide. There is a knock at the door…

La lezione - Mordini, De Angelis,  Accorsi.

It is unfamiliar and suspenseful before it gets round to reviving The Collector, Death and the Maiden and whatever happens to be your favourite bondage drama. Director Stefano Mordini and his actress wife Valentina Cervi have a background of films with Accorsi which we never get to see, like Provincia meccanica/Smalltown. It’s nice to find Stefano still in place so long after Les Brigades du Tigre and his Ferzan Özpetek films.

While it works over currently fashionable themes, this one doesn’t have enough conviction to justify the sado content, though it still rates as a slick suspense thriller.

La vita va così/Life Is Life is a class act from writer-director Riccardo Milani (the Antonio Albanese Come un gatto in tangenziale films). It manages to fit in between Local Hero & the Trump wedding.

In big city Milan (nice drone shots), broad-shouldered property czar Diego Abatantuono is assured by his board members that their multi-million-dollar South Sardinian beach development is all lined up and the one holdout, local farmer in his nineties Giuseppe Loi, won’t be a hindrance. However, Loi turns out to be the only pastoralist determined to graze his cattle on a beach and refuses the ridiculously inflating offers.

There is a leisurely introduction of the characters: His daughter Virginia Raffaele spends too much of her life looking after the old man now that her mother has moved into the village and her sister and brother would go from a week’s employment a year and waitering in the distant city to one with prospects and security if they got a fraction of the payout. Despite extreme car sickness, foreman Aldo Baglio, of the great Aldo, Giovanni & Giacomo team, is sent in and joins the locals pleading with Loi to accept the escalating offers.  The pharmacist, who graduated university, wants to use his skills -  and market skin care products to the tourists - and refuses him medication that the old man doesn’t (yet) need. The tiny vegetable store won’t sell spiked artichokes to the wife. The local cop hypothesises a crime wave with him getting to do all the law enforcement stuff, like spreading spiked tracks on the road.

The old man seems like a nut job standing in the way of progress and prosperity for all. However there are cracks in the solidarity. The grandkids encourage Loi, saying the annual holiday on his Furriadroxu is the only part of the year they enjoy. Raffaele, increasingly apprehensive, is appalled when Baglio’s bulldozers rip out the wild artichokes and fruit trees she’s known all her life. This pair are particularly winning and the film takes a step forward when they become an item, after he doesn’t phone the office when she gets a better advocate than the crooked lawyer the son-in-law located to draw up the thirty-five-page agreement, which Loi insists on reading all day at his fourth-grade level, when they fly him for the first time in his life, spotting the gotcha clause. They don’t seem to have any eminent domain provisions in their law.

We have been set up for this with the effective first cut to the wide shot of the sea & sky beyond the unspoiled white beach and crystal water coming after the Milan material. There's the hire car driver, who  Abatantuono specified should not be talkative, explaining that his living is chauffeuring tourists but the tourists come to see flamingos and the birds will desert the area when it is disturbed,  the visitor shaking off shoes to feel the sand, Judge Geppi Cucciari’s ("What it is like to be a woman in Sardinia”) taking a stand against the tourist dollar. “Italians do not do enough to keep their people.”

La vita va così/Life Is Life - end with Baglio, Raffaele, Loi, Abatantuono, Cucciari.

I don’t know that the ending pulls all this together, with  Abatantuono finally appearing in the sunny town square, but that does set up the irresistible final credits sequence when all the characters join in the street musician’s dance.

This all sounds like a re-run of Local Hero, particularly with the story of the beach that will be there after all of them, matched by Loi claiming the line of ancestors (… and his papa, and his papa…) without end. They say it’s the real-life story of a Sardinian shepherd but there are a few of these - Wild River, Tulsa, La terre qui meurt, Hud.

Which brings us, you can’t win them all, to Gli occhi dela altri/The Eyes of Others. Well, prestige Italian art filmmakers all feel the need to do decadent - Fellini Satyricon, Paolo Sorrentino’s  La grande bellezza and just about anything by Michelangelo Antonioni. Andrea, the newest De Sica, is determined to join in. His The Eyes of Others actually references La Dolce Vita (one of the characters was supposed to have been in it) and they do repeat-vistas of the rolling sea to evoke L’Aventura. Even these suspect ambitions are not met. It comes out closer to a kind of grim Edwige Fenech vehicle.

Gli occhi dela altri/The Eyes of Others.  - Filippo Timi, Jasmine Trinca

We open with supplies, including blocks of ice to be chipped for the guests’ drinks, being offloaded at the landing of Marquis Filippo (The American) Timi’s private island and soon we are in the gun room with Timi checking shotgun rounds for the next day’s hunt. He’s the local Duce, so he doesn’t have to worry about permits. His entourage is made up of campy enablers, business associates and glamorous women in string body suits.

Jasmine Trinca, who is a notable contributor to these Italian events (Diamonds, The Best of Youth) is conspicuous and, with a shape like that revealed, it’s not surprising that after the next sixties date caption she’s the new lady of the manor.  In fact, it’s a wonder Trinca doesn’t do more Edwige Fenech. She has a great build but someone should have warned her that this was not the best place to put it on show.  There’s a bit of side action like opening fire on tourists who dare to pull up to the dock and reaching under the bench in the menacing gun room to come up with a small-gauge movie camera, which Timi uses to film Trinca making it with boat boys and fellow guests, watched by their voyeurist launch operator. Filipo, being a suitably decadent aristocrat, offers to buy the maid’s baby for his childless lady. Finally, male-model-beautiful Matteo Olivetti shows up among the invitees for the silver suit costume party. He’s already understandably smitten with Jasmin. Filippo takes a dim view when they go off together.

It’s not even well made in the manner of these. The images are murky and the pacing slack. Outside the nudity, conspicuous consumerism is the most notable feature. De Sica has the hide to track it with ”Marie” the number his grandad Vittorio romanced Lia Franca to in Mario Camerini’s charming  1932 Gli uomini, che mascalzoni, safe in the knowledge that his international audience won’t remember that one any more than the Casati-Stampa society scandal on which this film is allegedly based. Italian critics, on the other hand, have taken his film - and its predecessors - more seriously than I do.

The King of Cashmere

Barrie Patison 2026.