EXCLUSIVE: Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, the Italian cinema showcase hosted by Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà in New York City, returns for its 25th edition this year and will run from May 28 to June 4. Scroll down for the full list of titles.
The programme will feature 15 films, including nine North American premieres.
The event will open with a screening of Carolina Cavalli’s The Kidnapping of Arabella. The film stars Benedetta Porcaroli as a 28-year-old who runs away with a girl she believes to be a younger version of herself. Also starring are Chris Pine and Eva Robins. Like many of the titles in the Open Roads lineup, The Kidnapping of Arabella debuted at last year’s Venice Film Festival. Porcaroli won the Venice Orizzonti’s Best Actress award for her performance.
Laura Samani will bring her 2025 Venice Orizzonti title A Year of School to Open Roads for its North American premiere. The film follows a 17-year-old Swedish girl who enrolls in an all-male high school class in her new home of Trieste. Giacomo Covi won the Orizzonti Best Actor award for his performance in the film.
Other titles receiving their North American premieres at Open Roads include Andrea Di Stefano’s My Tennis Maestro, a sports comedy set in the 1980s that follows a 13-year-old budding tennis star and a former pro on a shared journey of training and competing along the Italian coast. And Andrea De Sica’s The Eyes of Others.
Elsewhere, veteran filmmaker Mario Martone returns to Open Roads with his latest Fuori. The film, which was nominated for nine Donatello Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Valeria Golino, follows a writer who lands in prison for an unexpected act. Inside, she creates a unique bond with some of the young inmates. Once released from prison, the women maintain their friendship to the surprise of everyone else in their lives.
Open Roads, this year, also celebrates the 120th anniversary of Roberto Rossellini’s birth. The event will screen Rossellini’s 1946 film Paisan and hand a North American premiere to the doc Roberto Rossellini, Living Without a Script from Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, and Andrea Paolo Massara. The film is a portrait of the filmmaker using archival footage.
Open Roads is supported in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and with the support of NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
Film at Lincoln Center Programmer Dan Sullivan described this year’s edition as “especially stimulating” with its focus on “spotlighting some of Italy’s greatest up-and-coming talent” while honoring Roberto Rossellini, a “pivotal, paradigm-shifting figure in the history of world cinema.”
“Taken as a whole, this lineup offers some interesting propositions about the present and future of Italian cinema, while also deeply engaging with its incomparable past,” Sullivan said.
Manuela Cacciamani, CEO of Cinecittà, hailed Open Roads as a champion of Italian cinema and said the event’s 25th edition was a distinct mark of success, but also provided “an opportunity to look ahead.”
“Perhaps in light of this anniversary, the selection of Italian films heading to Film at Lincoln Center feels especially dazzling—young, experimental, and full of new energy,” he said. “And there is a towering masterpiece: Paisà by Roberto Rossellini. A film that, 60 years ago, captured Italy with striking immediacy—alive with expressive urgency and hope.”
Cacciamani added: “Here they are: this year’s Open Roads films offer a moving snapshot of a vital and evolving Italian cinema, one that gives us real reason to be hopeful for the road ahead. Open Roads knows—and will continue to know—how to embrace this creative energy.”
OPEN ROADS 2026 LINEUP:
All films will screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street)
Opening Night
The Kidnapping of Arabella / Il rapimento di Arabella
Carolina Cavalli, 2025, Italy, 107m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A delightfully idiosyncratic homage to sisterhood, Carolina Cavalli’s sophomore feature stars Benedetta
Porcaroli as stifled 28-year-old Holly, who has a chance encounter with the titular 8-year-old (Lucrezia
Guglielmino). Intuitively convinced that this girl is quite literally a younger version of herself, Holly runs
away with Arabella and sets into motion a frequently comic and just as often profoundly reflective chain
of events by which our heroines will strive to make peace with their pasts, their present, and their
futures. Chris Pine makes an unforgettable appearance as Arabella’s deadpan novelist father. Porcaroli
won the Orizzonti Best Actress Award at the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere, and she was nominated
for a Donatello Award, alongside Cavalli’s nod for Best New Director, for her 2022 debut, Amanda. An
Oscilloscope Laboratories release.
Thursday, May 28 at 7:00pm – Q&A with Carolina Cavalli and Benedetta Porcaroli
Wednesday, June 3 at 6:00pm
A Brief Affair / Breve storia d’amore
Ludovica Rampoldi, 2025, Italy, 100m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A delectably funny and mischievous sex comedy that mines romantic infidelity to unforgettable effect,
decorated screenwriter Ludovica Rampoldi’s feature debut at the helm boasts an all-star cast more than
up to the task of performing her meticulously crafted games of the heart. Pilar Fogliati’s Lea meets cute
with Adriano Giannini’s Rocco and they begin a hesitant affair, which takes a turn when Lea becomes a
patient of Rocco’s therapist wife (a brilliant, devious Valeria Golino). A Brief Affair’s pleasures are
unmistakably throwback, but Rampoldi unspools her drama with a sly, modern energy that makes its
twists and turns all the more delightful. Rampoldi earned a nomination for Best New Director at this
year’s Donatello Awards, and Golino was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Friday, May 29 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Ludovica Rampoldi
Tuesday, June 2 at 3:30pm
Agnus Dei
Massimiliano Camaiti, 2025, Italy, 73m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A fascinating, patient observation of papal arcana, Massimilano Camaiti’s hypnotic and sensitive
documentary captures the process by which, each year at the Monastery of Saint Cecilia in Rome, two
newborn lambs are blessed and afforded treatment befitting His Holiness himself, cared for closely by a
cloistered nun who prepares their wool for its destiny as part of a sacred vestment to be worn by the
Pope on June 29, the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul. A Venice Film Festival selection in the College
Cinema section, Agnus Dei is an indelible, transfixing glimpse at movingly mystical procedures carried out
in a sacred, somewhat obscure place while the winds of change blow outside its walls.
Sunday, May 31 at 3:00pm
Thursday, June 4 at 12:30pm
Elisa
Leonardo Di Costanzo, 2025, Italy/Switzerland, 105m
Italian and French with English subtitles
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Leonardo Di Costanzo (The Inner Cage, Open Roads 2022) returns with this magnetic study of pathology
and memory, based on real-life criminological research on perpetrators of violent crimes. Barbara Ronchi
stars as the titular convict, 10 years into a prison sentence after having been convicted of murdering her
sister without any apparent motive. Elisa claims to remember nothing about the crime and refuses to
delve into her own past, but when she agrees to be a subject for a criminologist’s (Roschdy Zem)
research, she finds herself confronting head-on her repressed feelings of guilt and the feasibility of
something like redemption. Valeria Golino plays a supporting role as the grieving, insistent mother of a
victim who meets with Zem’s criminologist. Nominated for two Donatello Awards, including Best Actress
for Ronchi.
Friday, May 29 at 8:30pm – Q&A with Barbara Ronchi
Thursday, June 4 at 2:30pm
The Eyes of Others / Gli occhi degli altri
Andrea De Sica, 2025, Italy, 90m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The latest from Andrea De Sica (Children of the Night, Open Roads 2017) is a captivatingly wicked,
satirical parable about sexual obsession and the violence of power. An enigmatic, surprising Jasmine
Trinca (who won the Monica Vitti Award for Best Actress at the Rome Film Festival) stars as Elena, a
woman whose arrival on the private island of an exorbitantly wealthy marquis (Filippo Timi) inaugurates
a by turns passionately tender, sordid, and murderous chronicle of the clash between love, eros, and
reckless, ruthless privilege. The rich textures and thick ambiance of The Eyes of Others are pure
high-modernist 1960s Italian cinema, but De Sica unfurls the film’s winding intrigues with a
contemporary sense of suspense, carnality, and visual boldness.
Saturday, May 30 at 6:00pm – Q&A with Andrea De Sica
Tuesday, June 2 at 8:30pm
Fuori
Mario Martone, 2025, Italy/France, 115m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
One of Italian cinema’s true latter-day maestros, Mario Martone returns to Open Roads (following a
three-film sidebar with his film Nostalgia in 2023) with this richly traced, dimensional, and surprising
real-life tale of the bond between three women who meet in prison—one of whom, Goliarda Sapienza
(Valeria Golino, operating at the height of her powers), is a well-known writer. After the three are
released, their relationship deepens amid the challenges of rejoining society on the outside. Based on a
1983 novel by Sapienza, Fuori is marked by Martone’s characteristically elegant dramatization,
performed and embodied with an entrancing brilliance by a never-better Golino. Nominated for nine
Donatello Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Golino.
Thursday, May 28 at 3:30pm
I Want Her Dead / Il quieto vivere
Gianluca Matarrese, 2025, Italy, 86m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Mining decades-long conflicts within his own family to analyze the ties that bind in a small Calabrian
village, Gianluca Matarrese boldly melds high-tension documentary and expressive fiction in this tale of
enmity between Luisa and Imma, two sisters-in-law with a mutual axe to grind (to say the least).
Matarrese delves into the history underlying these two women’s longstanding feud and arrives at a
tragicomic, inventive meditation on the metaphysical possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Sunday, May 31 at 12:30pm
La gioia
Nicolangelo Gelormini, 2025, Italy, 108m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
A blackly comic tale about the fragility of human connection in a cynical world, Nicolangelo Gelormini’s
new film stars Valeria Golino as a cloistered high school teacher living under the oppressive thumb of her
parents. An improbable relationship emerges between her and one of her students (Saul Nanni), a
hustler selling his body to support his mother, and the fallout finds sexual repression and quasi-nihilistic
social ambition colliding to terrible, engrossing effect. In a year of standout roles for Golino, La gioia
might mark her most playful, surprising performance.
Friday, May 29 at 3:00pm – Q&A with Nicolangelo Gelormini
Tuesday, June 2 at 1:00pm
Mosquitoes / Le bambine
Valentina Bertani, Nicole Bertani, 2025, Italy/Switzerland/France, 105m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The debut feature from sisters Valentina and Nicole Bertani is a swirling, stylish twist on the
coming-of-age film. Set in 1997, the film follows 8-year-old Linda, who hails from a wealthy family, as she
meets two other girls, Azzura and Martha, forging a summertime sisterhood that protects them in
clashes major and minor with the selfish, petty agendas of the adults in their midst. An especially visually
striking debut, Mosquitoes exists in a saturated hyperreality that is consummately engrossing, and
announces the Bertani sisters as formidable portraitists of girlhood cast against the backdrop of an
alternately beautiful and oppressive world.
Sunday, May 31 at 5:30pm
Wednesday, June 3 at 8:30pm
My Tennis Maestro / Il maestro
Andrea Di Stefano, 2025, Italy, 125m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A sports comedy with a big heart, the latest from Andrea Di Stefano reteams the director with his Last
Night of Amore star Pierfrancesco Favino for a charming, sensitive tale of the crushing expectations
levied upon young athletic prodigies. Set in the late 1980s, the film follows 13-year-old Felice (an
exceptional Tiziano Menichelli), a budding tennis star whose overbearing father hooks him up with Raul
Getti (Favino), a flameout former pro with a new lithium prescription and a serious ladies-man streak.
Raul and Felice set off on a shared journey of training and competing along the Italian coast as Felice
struggles to figure out his identity outside of his on-the-court gifts, while Raul questions whether his
eminently laid-back approach is a good fit for his star pupil.
Sunday, May 30 at 8:45pm – Q&A with Andrea Di Stefano
Orfeo
Virgilio Villoresi, 2025, Italy, 74m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
A visual adventure marked by formal ingenuity and a profound feeling for dream logic, Virgilio
Villoresi’s singular take on the myth of Orpheus is an entrancing celebration of the possibilities
of cinematic artifice. Villoresi reenvisions Orpheus as a loner pianist whose gaze meets that of a
stranger, Eura, at the club where he performs one night; they fall in love, only for Eura to
disappear almost as suddenly. Orpheus catches a glimpse of her some time later and follows
her into what we come to realize is a visionary, sensual reimagination of the underworld.
Adapted from Dino Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel Poema a fumetti, Villoresi’s feature debut combines
beautiful 16mm photography, lovingly handcrafted sets, meticulously orchestrated stop-motion
animation, and in-camera optical effects to arrive at a mesmerizing, artisanal work that announces its
director as one of Italian cinema’s most exciting new voices. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.
Sunday, May 31 at 8:45pm
Wednesday, June 3 at 3:30pm
Primavera
Damiano Michieletto, 2025, Italy, 111m
Italian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
The improbable relationship between a young orphan violin virtuoso and composer Antonio Vivaldi in
early-18th-century Venice is at the heart of acclaimed opera and theater director Damiano Michieletto’s
debut feature. Cecilia (Tecla Insolia) lives at the Ospedale della Pietà, a secluded home for abandoned
girls run by no-nonsense nuns, while she awaits the return of the man with whom she will enter an
arranged marriage when he returns home from war. But when the Pietà brings on Vivaldi to serve as
their new musical instructor, Cecilia’s life takes a turn, and the possibility of a hitherto unimagined future
emerges. Written by Ludovica Rampoldi (whose own directorial debut, A Brief Affair, is also in this year’s
edition of Open Roads), Primavera is a gripping, gorgeously realized meditation on the seldom-simple
relationship between talent and destiny.
Friday, May 29 at 12:00pm
Wednesday, June 3 at 1:00pm
Roberto Rossellini, Living Without a Script / Roberto Rossellini, Più di una Vita
Ilaria de Laurentiis, Raffaele Brunetti, Andrea Paolo Massara, 2025, Italy, 96m
Italian with English subtitles
North American Premiere
2026 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Roberto Rossellini, one of 20th-century Italian cinema’s
undisputed masters. But as this rich new documentary shows us, Rossellini found himself at a
particularly challenging point in his career 70 years earlier, in 1956, reeling from the mixed response to
his legendary films with wife Ingrid Bergman as their marriage appears to be at the point of collapse. An
invitation from the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to shoot a documentary about modern
India marks a reinvention for Rossellini and an exciting new development in his iconic artistry. Using a
wealth of archival footage, this deeply pleasurable documentary paints a dazzling portrait of Rossellini
across the years leading up to his death in 1977, and is an ecstatic, cinephilic tribute to one of world
cinema’s true titans.
Monday, June 1 at 6:00pm – Introduction by Ingrid Rossellini
A Year of School / Un anno di scuola
Laura Samani, 2025, Italy/France, 102m
English, Italian, and Swedish with English subtitles
North American Premiere
The latest from Laura Samani (Small Body, Open Roads 2022) recasts a 1929 novella by Giani Stuparich in 2007 Trieste, following 17-year-old Swede Fredrika (Stella Wendick) as she enrolls in an otherwise
all-male class at the local technical high school after her father uproots her family following his
reassignment to the city by his employer. Fredrika’s friendships with the boys in her midst transform her,
leaving her navigating the currents of burgeoning adulthood. Featuring an especially magnetic
performance by Giacomo Covi, who won the Orizzonti Best Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Tuesday, June 2 at 6:00pm
Roberto Rossellini 120th Birthday Tribute Screening
Paisan / Paísa
Roberto Rossellini, 1946, Italy, 126m
English, German, and Italian with English subtitles
Roberto Rossellini followed up his paradigm-shifting Rome, Open City with this exceptionally ambitious
anthology film set at the end of World War II, chronicling the liberation of Italy from a multitude of
perspectives gathered from across the country. Marked by the documentary-infused
directness of Rome, Open City, the film’s cast of professional actors and striking nonprofessionals enact a kaleidoscopic account of the extreme consequences of life during
wartime, as well as the emerging relations between American soldiers on their liberation
campaign and the Italian civilians they cross paths with. A crucial installment of his War Trilogy
(alongside Rome, Open City and Germany Year Zero), Paisan endures as one of the great cinematic
depictions of the effects of war on the lives of everyday people—and a signature work
in Rossellini’s astonishing oeuvre.
Monday, June 1 at 8:30pm – Introduction by Ingrid Rossellini
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