Wandering Shadows (2004)

Leo and Angela Russo live a simple life in Queens, surrounded by their overbearing Italian-American family. When their son finds success on his high school basketball team, Leo tears the family apart trying to make it happen.

From the Atlantic to the Black Sea, Mathias and Philippe, two old friends, embark on a bicycle journey that Mathias’s son made before his tragic death. The two men ride through the ordeals with tenderness, humor and emotion.

A film director gathers his favorite actresses, those he worked with and those he loved. He wants to make a film about women but he doesn’t reveal much: he observes them, takes cue, until his imaginary throw them into another era, in a past where the noise of the sewing machines fills a workplace handled and populated by women, where men have minor and marginal roles and cinema can be told from another point of view: the one of costume. Between loneliness, passions, anxieties, heartbreaking absence and unbreakable bonds, reality and fiction permeate, as well as the lives of the actresses and those of the characters, the competition and the sisterhood, the visible and the invisible.

Julio and Ana have been together for more than fifteen years. They have become a couple who no longer look at nor touch one another, and who have made daily fighting the essence of their relationship. This evening, Ana has invited their upstairs neighbors to come round, Salva and Laura, a couple younger than them, pleasant and friendly, but whose noises are now an annoyance for Julio and Ana... or perhaps a stimulus? The upstairs neighbors will make them an unusual and surprising proposal which will turn the evening into an exaggerated and cathartic experience for all four.

When 43-year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet finds out that she's seriously ill, she decides to go looking for a child she was forced to abandon when she was only 15. On her madcap bureaucratic quest she crosses paths with JB, a 50-year-old man in the middle of a burnout, and Mr. Blin, a blind archivist prone to overenthusiasm. The unlikely trio set off on a hilarious and poignant helterskelter journey across the city in search of Suze's long-lost child.

Gabrielle is a "statue" for tourists, much to the chagrin of her teenage son. Elsa is in angry at the world and desperate to become pregnant. Mao is a chronically depressed video game designer who drowns his melancholy in alcohol and psychoanalysis. They are brother and sisters but do not hang out. Ever. Their parents Pierre and Claudine, separated for a long time, have really done nothing to strengthen the bonds of the family - yet, at their grandfather's funeral, they are going to have to meet, and together answer the question: "What to do with grandma?"

A 22 year-old Bangladeshi-Italian Muslim boy meets a beautiful, exciting Italian girl who makes him re-analyze his beliefs and culture.

A year after the first movie, the four friends are enjoying their lives to the fullest, get in trouble once again with Bholi, who is released from prison earlier than expected and is broke.

Dumped by his girlfriend and finding himself stranded on different couches at friends’ places, Guido tries to transform his drift into an opportunity for a new beginning.

In a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Taranto, high upon the rooftops framed by the Ilva steel factory, we meet Tonino a.k.a. “Barboncino” (poodle). Tonino has just committed a robbery and, in a moment of foolishness, fled from his accomplices, taking the entire loot for himself. He escapes upward, clambering from roof to roof, until he can go no further and must take refuge in an old water tank. Here he finds Renato, a strange and eccentric man who believes he is an American Indian from the Sioux tribe. Trapped with no other choice, Tonino is forced to team up with Renato. A strange and crazy friendship is formed, and Tonino learns to see things from a very different perspective.