The 2025 edition of the Italian Film Days – in collaboration with Spazju Kreattiv and the M.A. in film studies of the Faculty of Arts (University of Malta) – is now on!
Five Italian movies playing for the first time in Malta!
All screenings are in Italian with English subtitles
Ticket PRICES REDUCED for the members of the Institute: don’t forget your membership card!
VERMIGLIO
by Maura Delpero
Saturday, March 1 at 4.00pm
Friday, March 7 at 7.30pm
Thursday, March 13 at 7.30pm
Sunday, March 16 at 4.30pm
Wednesday, March 19 at 4.30pm
Sunday, March 23 at 7.30pm
Saturday, March 29 at 7.30pm
Vermiglio is a deeply emotional story directed by Maura Delpero and set in 1944 in a remote village in Trentino during the aftermath of World War II: a poignant journey about family, sacrifice, and the power of healing.
The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, and was designated as the Italian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
IL RAGAZZO DAI PANTALONI ROSA (The boy with pink pants)
by Margherita Ferri
Tuesday, April 29 at 19:30
Margherita Ferri’s intimate film tells the harrowing true tale of a 15-year-old boy who took his own life after enduring bullying at school and online. The Boy With Pink Pants has conquered Italian audiences en masse striking an emotional chord across the country and becoming a cultural phenomenon.
Touching on teenage angst, bullying and rampant homophobia at a Rome-set high school, the movie follows Andrea, a bright and preppy adolescent with straight A’s and a talent for singing, who enrolls in a new school and struggles to cope with his parents’ divorce while trying to make friends.
PARTHENOPE
by Paolo Sorrentino
Sunday, May 4 at 4.30pm
Friday, May 9 at 7.30pm
Saturday, May 10 at 7.30pm
Wednesday, May 14 at 7.30pm
Saturday, May 17 at 4pm
Thursday, May 22 at 7.30pm
Sunday, May 25 at 4.30pm
A decades-spanning drama about a young woman born in Naples — the hometown of writer-director Paolo Sorrentino — Parthenope is an exquisite treatise on cinematic beauty. Chronicling her birth, her youthful teenage summers and the years she spends adrift as a young adult, the film is an intoxicating reflection on the way people and places are seen, and the way they see themselves.
Celeste Dalla Porta delivers a beguiling performance as the film’s eponymous subject, a woman of such stunning beauty that people stop and stare. She is named, after all, for the founder of Naples, and one of the six sirens of Green mythology, but Sorrentino maintains a consistent awareness of the ogling idealism he applies to Parthenope.
LUCE
by Luca Bellino and Silvia Luzi
Wednesday, June 18 at 7.30pm
Luce stars Marianna Fontana as a woman in her early twenties who has an alienating job in a leather factory in a cold and rainy town in Southern Italy “and feels the need to fill an absence in her life”.
The directors said they shot Luce based on a script that was “rewritten day by day”, using “real places, real people, sequential shots” and “acting that is no longer fiction but a staging of oneself” before going on to lavish praise on protagonist Marianna Fontana for being “the heart of the film”.
L’ABBAGLIO (The illusion)
by Roberto Andò
Tuesday, July 29 at 7.30pm
The film opens in 1860 in Liguria, where volunteers are being recruited for the expedition and where two singular (fictitious) characters prove particularly eye-catching: Domenico Tricò, a humble peasant and expert fireworks handler who has emigrated to the North (Ficarra), and Rosario Spitale (Picone), a noble-born yet penniless Sicilian who’s an adventurer and a deft hand at card games.
Once again, we find cinema availing itself of the past to explore the present, and Andò does so expertly, cunningly and with lightness of hand, trusting in Toni Servillo’s soberly measured performance and the photographic prowess of his faithful collaborator Maurizio Calvesi, who captures the region’s vibrant light and frames the rugged beauty of an unusually green Sicily (Trapani and the town of Erice, and Palermo for the external and interior shots) as if it were a Western.