Lauro Versari

In the late 1970s and early 80s, assassinations in Sicily get the attention of Communist deputy, Pio La Torre, who appeals to General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to become prefect in Palermo and take on the Mafia. Dalla Chiesa approaches the job with the same focus and methods he used in hunting down the Red Brigade.

A new teacher introduces radical ideas at a nursery school and it leads to various reactions from the students and the parents.

A young recruit to the Italian army discovers and rejects the seedy world of soldiers who prostitute themselves to supplement their income. But before leaving this world he is raped by a highly-respected senior officer and must decide whether to risk bringing proceedings against him.

Alessia, a TV showgirl, tries to win the favor of an official. Amalia, a morning show host, satisfies the masochistic director in order to go to prime time. Stefania "works hard" to act in a risqué film by a famous director, but the part is stolen from her by her friend Beatrice, apparently only devoted to her studies.

The story of the first ever "anti-mafia judges pool" established in the '80s at the Palermo Courthouse, in Sicily, in the '80s, while two mafia families started a 10-year-long war to obtain the complete control of smuggles.

Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love (1895) is a blasphemous play set in 1495, during the first recorded outbreak of syphilis, which Panizza satirically presents as the punishment from Satan for sexually active humans. As a result, Panizza was imprisoned for obscenity. Schroeter alternates scenes from the Panizza’s work with a dramatization of his trial, presenting the play as an expressionist spectacle performed by actors wearing exaggerated makeup who gesture and grimace grotesquely. The film thus forms a bridge between Schroeter’s use of tableaux in his early experiments with the political urgency of his 1980s films. On the eve of the AIDS crisis, Schroeter is presciently worried about disease as an excuse for governmental repression and the oppression of sexuality. - Harvard Film Archive