Ciro Cascina

Italie 1609. Accusé de meurtre, Le Caravage a fui Rome et s’est réfugié à Naples. Soutenu par la puissante famille Colonna, Le Caravage tente d’obtenir la grâce de l’Église pour revenir à Rome. Le Pape décide alors de faire mener par un inquisiteur, l’Ombre, une enquête sur le peintre dont l’art est jugé subversif et contraire à la morale de l’Église.

Based on true events of the late 60s in Italy, poet, playwright and myrmecologist Aldo Braibanti is prosecuted and sentenced to prison for the love he shares with his barely-of-age pupil and friend, Ettore. Amidst a chorus of voices of accusers, supporters and a largely hypocritical public, a single committed journalist takes on the task of piecing together the truth, between secrecy and desire, facing suspicion and censorship in the process.

The exploitation of young men as prostitutes in the district around the Roman coliseum is the focus of Simon Bischoff's documentary and fiction piece that spares no close-up view of male anatomy. This latter trait reveals just as much about the tenor of this film as it does about the body. Several years earlier, Bischoff met the main 17-year-old protagonist here, "Er Moretto," when he was just a 13-year-old runaway. The intervening years show how he changed into a streetwise vendor of sex, and Bischoff also details how the 17-year-old is picked up by a middle-aged man to be his companion. Fiction segments do not fare as well as the documentary aspects of this work, which in the end, seems at least ambiguous, if not questionable, in its intent.

On November 24 in 1979 a brand new event took place in Pisa: the police gave permission to stage the first national gay parade, organized in collaboration with the City of Pisa. The march was an unexpected success, with hundreds of gays and transgender people coming from every part of Italy. They paraded openly and the city was partly friendly and partly hostile. This documentary features personal memories and political comments from the past to the present. Using images of contemporary society and exclusive archival material, twelve people, participants and organizers, recall how that historic day was created, its relevance and consequences for their own lives and for the gay community as a whole.

A journey between the sacred and profane in which the Femminielli, an ancient non-binary Neapolitan figure, fight for their survival against the globalizing tides of modernity.