The best Francesco Barilli’s movies

The study of a youth on the edge of adulthood and his aunt, ten years older. Fabrizio is passionate, idealistic, influenced by Cesare, a teacher and Marxist, engaged to the lovely but bourgeois Clelia, and stung by the drowning of his mercurial friend Agostino, a possible suicide. Gina is herself a bundle of nervous energy, alternately sweet, seductive, poetic, distracted, and unhinged. They begin a love affair after Agostino's funeral, then Gina confuses Fabrizio by sleeping with a stranger. Their visits to Cesare and then to Puck, one of Gina's older friends, a landowner losing his land, dramatize contrasting images of Italy's future. Their own futures are bleak.

A three-billion-lire hit. A bloody hold-up. A sole survivor. Hunted down by fate and ruthless gangsters, Leo Piazza finds himself with a "hot" suitcase on his hands. Forced to go into hiding, time is running out. The killers want him dead so they can retrieve the loot and the showdown draws near... A nocturnal and silent anti-hero, Piazza moves like a zombie, like the living dead.

Alex and Max are two "bachelors" who share the same house: Alex, advertising copywriter, is boxing, is an impenitent dongiovanni and does not hesitate to betray his colleague and girlfriend Paola; Max, saxophonist, neglects his ulcer and is attracted, yes, but also scared, by women. The meeting with the chorister Anna at a recording session gives birth to a relationship that she would like to realize in a cohabitation that frightens the other. Meanwhile, Alex, between an adventure and the other, waits for the call of the only woman for whom he spits, Eleonora, who is undecided whether to leave for him the man to whom he is bound, exasperates him in a frustrating way. The father of Alex then, Dante, who has a relationship with a young woman, called Chicca, asks in vain to his son to act as a peacemaker with her, who has left him. Anna.

The relations between Parma and cinema were so strong for almost the whole of the twentieth century that this city became an early laboratory of ideas and theories on cinema and a set chosen by some of the greatest Italian authors and beyond. Furthermore, a considerable number of directors, actors, screenwriters and set designers were born in Parma who have made their way internationally, testifying to the fact that in this small city in Northern Italy there was a decidedly cinematic air. Red armchairs takes up the thread of this story, wondering why, unique among the Italian provincial cities, Parma has given so much to the cinema, accompanying the viewer on a journey backwards that from the first projections of the Lumière cinema reaches the ultramodern experience of new multiplexes. During this journey we will meet the characters who created the conditions for this diffusion of cinematographic culture in Parma.