2023 – 3 SATURDAYS
Introduction by Anna Brusutti
UCSB Film and Media Dept
        FREE ADMISSION

Cari Amici – Dear Friends,

It is with great pleasure that we announce the 2023 movie line-up of Cinema Italiano Classico.

This year we will present  three wonderful classic movies starring a group of  fabulous Italian actors. They will make you laugh and cry; but more than anything else, they will entertain and delight you.

As in the past, each movie will be presented by Anna Brusutti, our Artistic Director.

And here are the three movies:

Saturday, February 25    
RISO AMARO
(Bitter Rice)

Cast:                           Vittorio Gassman, Silvana Mangano
Genre:                       Crime Drama, 1949              
Runtime:                 105 minutes
Rated:                       Not rated
Language:              Italian (English subtitles)
Awards:                   Academy Award Nomination-Best Story
Directed by           GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS

Synopsis:
Northern Italy’s Po Valley, an earthy rice-field worker (Silvana Mangano) falls in with a small-time criminal (Vittorio Gassman), who with his girlfriend (Doris Dowling) is planning a daring heist of the crop. Released in 1949, Bitter Rice is both a socially conscious look at field workers’ hardships and a melodrama of sex and violence—neorealism with a dose of pulp, enhanced by meticulously choreographed tracking shots by director Giuseppe De Santis and cinematographer Otello Martelli.

Saturday, March 4^{th –}
STROMBOLI  TERRA  DI  DIO
(Stromboli Land of God)

Cast:                                     Ingrid Bergman, Mario Vitale     
Genre:                                 Drama, 1950
Runtime:                           96 minutes
Rated:                                 PG
Language:                        Italian (English subtitles)
Film Awards:                   Best Foreign Actress in Italian                                                  
Directed by                      ROBERTO ROSSELLINI

 Synopsis: 
Lithuanian Karin (Ingrid Bergman) flees her war-ravaged home country and winds up in Italy, where she’s sent to an internment camp. There, she meets Antonio (Mario Vitale), a POW who’s just been freed. They enjoy a brief romance, punctuated by Antonio’s marriage proposal, and Karin, seeing her chance to escape the camp, accepts. But Antonio takes her back to Stromboli, the volcanic island he lives on, and Karin struggles with a language barrier, brutal living conditions and her outsider status.

Saturday, March 11
LO  SCEICCO  BIANCO 
(The White Sheik)

Cast:                                          Alberto Sordi, Brunella Bovo, Leopoldo Trieste
Genre:                                       Comedy, Adventure 1952                      
Runtime:                                 86 minutes
Rated:                                       Not Rated                                    
Language:                               Italian (English subtitles)  
Awards:                                    Golden Lion Nomination-Federico Fellini
Directed by:                            FEDERICO FELLINI

 Synopsis:
Federico Fellini drew upon his background as a cartoonist for his first solo feature, a charming comic fable about the lure of fantasy and the pitfalls of temptation. In Rome for her honeymoon, a wide-eyed newlywed (Brunella Bovo) sneaks away from her straitlaced groom (Leopoldo Trieste) and goes in search of the White Sheik (Alberto Sordi), the dashing hero of a photographed comic strip of which she is enamored—but soon discovers that her romantic ideal may be only an illusion.

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Sponsored by The Italian Cultural Heritage Foundation of Santa Barbara, a 501 (c)(3) organization

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