The Istituto Luce turned ninety in 2014, its decades-long history intertwined with that of Italy itself, through cinema and that unique treasure trove of images known to all as the Luce Archives. To celebrate its anniversary, some of the most acclaimed rising filmmakers in Italy were invited to make a small film, with each director selecting ten minutes of footage from the archives, out of the thousands of hours of footage to be found there. The result is an album full of different narratives.

A portrait of actress Eleonora Duse.

A journey through Italy marked by the rhythmic sound of the long distance express trains. Landscapes flash past, at times marred by the intervention of Man, at times intact and beautiful. Inside, the passing of time is marked only by the variations of light. A terrain of encounters and solitude.

[马丁·伊登]导演皮耶特罗·马切罗将执导新片[约婚夫妇](I Promessi Sposi，暂译)。影片根据意大利作家阿历山德罗·曼佐尼撰写的同名历史小说改编，作者以一对青年男女的悲欢离合和婚姻波折为主线，描绘出17世纪意大利各阶层的人物及其风云变幻的社会生活，被誉为反映当时社会的百科全书。

In northern France, Juliette grows up alone with her father, Raphaël, a veteran of the First World War. Passionate about singing and music, the lonely young girl meets a magician one summer who promises that scarlet sails will one day take her away from her village. Juliette never stops believing in the prophecy. Freely inspired by the tale "The Scarlet Sails" by Aleksandr Grin, Pietro Marcello's film blends music, history and folklore, bordering on magical realism.

Pulcinella, a foolish servant, is sent from the depths of Mt. Vesuvius to present-day Campania to grant the last wish of poor shepherd Tommaso, who spent his whole life looking after a crumbling Bourbon estate: his mission is to save a young buffalo named Sarchiapone. Pulcinella takes the buffalo north and the two servants, man and beast, travel through a beautiful and lost Italy.

The Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelešjan was unknown in the West until 1983, when the French critic Serge Daney approached him and, together with a handful of other fans of his work, introduced his work to Europe. According to the French critic, “Pelešjan’s aim is to capture the emotional and social ’cardiogram’ of his time“. This film is not trying to be a biography, or even a documentary, but simply the result of an extraordinary undertaking: filming – for the first time in thirty years – one of the greats of world cinema. Pelešjan’s cinema is a cinema of intensity and, at the same time, the precise experimentation of a form of “distance editing“. Although deriving from the work of Sergei M. Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, it distances itself from the two great Russian filmmakers’ own principles of editing. The film is constructed around “distance editing“ – as an experimental hyperbole and proof of an interior editing: it opens with a meeting with Pelešjan in Moscow, filming his fleeting and intense figure, before retrieving fragments of his works and new material showing him at exceptional times in his life. Extraordinary repertories from the director’s biography include sequences taken from film shoots and from his diploma exam at the VGIK, the prestigious Pan-Russian Institute of Film in Moscow.
Director's Statement
Il silenzio di Pelešjan aims to outline the portrait of a memory: the work of Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelešjan. A memory of his works and creativity, the memory of cinema and its relationship with the man, his life, his way of thinking, his emotions and the incessant, infinite paths that connect one with the other. The portrait of Pelešjan is made up of inspired and lyrical visions, a space of visions constellated by sequences from his works and fragments of his life: vibrant film footage that gives us a sense of his extremely expressive work, in which the creative movement that generated it is not ruined by our intervention.

Enzo returns to Genoa after a lengthy absence. He crosses the city in search of places he remembers from before but they have been inexorably changed by passing time. He finds Mary waiting for him at the small house in the ghetto of the old city. His life-long companion, she has been waiting for Enzo to return from the prison where he was serving time.
“I didn’t know Genoa well before making the film. My only memories of the city were stories that my father used to tell me. He was a sailor from southern Italy and he would make port calls there. Throughout his entire youth Genoa was his ideal city. He would always tell me how beautiful it was, about the places where he would eat tripe and about the sky. I saw a different Genoa that is full of blind alleys, where – like most of the cities in the North – the social fabric is disappearing and memory is impressed in the stones of Sottoripa. I tried to show the present situation around me, while the nostalgia for the twentieth century is represented by archive footage, clips from amateur and professional movies, made by the people of Genoa a long time ago.”

This is a tribute to an artist whose songs told the story of Italy at a time of rapid social and cultural change. Thanks to the testimony of the singer’s manager and friend Tobia Righi, and an effective and original use of archive material, Pietro Marcello retraces the life of Lucio Dalla, making him a spotlight through which Marcello sheds light on a country that rose from the ruins of the Second World War to sever its roots with peasant culture and move towards a future of factories, consumerism and mass car production. Not handsome or dashing like the other singers of his generation, Lucio Dalla embodied a different role model that was closer to ordinary people. For here was an artist capable of transposing the poetry of Roversi, who provided the lyrics for some of Dalla’s most beautiful songs, into a musical arrangement that spoke to everyone.
The director of Martin Eden returns to the documentary form with a film that pays tribute not only to a great singer but also to a notion of a people that has vanished with him.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

2019 film directed by Pietro Marcello

爱丽丝·洛尔瓦彻([幸福的拉扎罗])、皮耶特罗·马切罗([马丁·伊登])、弗兰西斯科·穆尼兹([黑色灵魂])将联合执导纪录片[未来](Futura，暂译)。该纪录片被称为三位导演的“集体调查”，他们在意大利各地旅行，与遇到的青少年对话，询问他们对未来的期望与前景。该纪录片将通过青少年的眼睛来观察意大利。