36 Films & TV Shows Set In Italy During The 1930s
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Il cattivo poeta
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930s1936. Giovanni Comini, the youngest Federal in Fascist Italy, is summoned to Rome for a delicate mission: to monitor aging national poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose increasingly restless behavior Mussolini fears could damage his alliance with Nazi Germany. However, after spending time with D'Annunzio, Comini finds himself torn between loyalty to the Party and his fascination with the poet, who will put his burgeoning career at risk.
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Kanche
🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇹 Italy The 1940s The 1930sA love story played out against the backdrop of World War II.
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Giovanna's Father
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930s The 1940sBologna 1938 - Michele Casali is living a desperate situation: Giovanna, his only child, a teenager, has killed out of jealousy his classmate and best friend. Within the middle-class environment in which the crime has ocurred, the story provokes strong emotion and disbelief. Avoiding jail, she is determined to be mentally disturbed and therefore locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Reggio Emilia where she remains until the age of 24 years (1945). During this period of almost total isolation, the only person who takes care of her is the father who moves from Bologna specifically, where he taught art in high school Galvani, to Reggio.
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Brideshead Revisited
England 🇮🇹 Italy The 1930s The 1920sEvery temptation has its price. — Based on Evelyn Waugh's 1945 classic British novel, Brideshead Revisited is a poignant story of forbidden love and the loss of innocence set in England prior to the Second World War.
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A Good Woman
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sSeduction. Sex. Scandal. — Fleeing 1930s New York and leaving behind a chequered past, the giltzy divorcee Mrs Stella Erlynne travels to Italy's sun-dappled Amalfi coast. Mrs Erlynne's appearance causes a stir amongst the visiting aristocracy. Based on the Oscar Wilde play "Lady Windemere's Fan."
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De-Lovely
🇫🇷 France 🇮🇹 Italy California New York The 1950s The 1930s The 1920sA love that would never die and music that would live forever. — From Paris to Venice to Broadway to Hollywood, the lives of Cole Porter and his wife, Linda were never less than glamorous and wildly unconventional. And though Cole's thirst for life strained their marriage, Linda never stopped being his muse, inspiring some of the greatest sons of the twentieth century.
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Amen.
🇻🇦 Holy See 🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇹 Italy 🇵🇱 Poland The 1930sTwo Men Two Worlds One Cause — Kurt Gerstein—a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS—is horrified by what he sees in the death camps. he is then shocked to learn that the process he used to purify water for his troops by using Zyklon-B, is now used to kill people in gas chambers.
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Unfair Competition
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sTwo linen fabric dealers with their shops close to one another, battle against each other for more and more costumers. Umberto constantly loses clients because of the tough competition brought by Leone, who offers the best prices in the neighborhood. But they leave differences aside when the rise of Fascism places Anti-Semitic politics which rigidly control business like the one conducted by the Jewish Leone, and those new regulations are viewed by Umberto as completely unfair. The long rivalry soon becomes a great friendship.
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Tea with Mussolini
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940s The 1930sSemi-autobiographical film directed by Franco Zeffirelli, telling the story of young Italian boy Luca's upbringing by a circle of English and American women, before and during World War II.
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Human Remains
🇨🇳 China 🇩🇪 Germany 🇪🇸 Spain 🇮🇹 Italy 🇷🇺 Russia The 1930s The 1950s The 1940sHuman Remains is a haunting documentary which illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of the 20th century's most reviled dictators. The film unveils the personal lives of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the private and mundane details of their everyday lives -- their favorite foods, films, habits and sexual preferences. There is no mention of their public lives or of their place in history. The intentional omission of the horrors for which these men were responsible hovers over the film.
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Life Is Beautiful
🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇹 Italy The 1940s The 1930sAn unforgettable fable that proves love, family and imagination conquer all. — A touching story of an Italian book seller of Jewish ancestry who lives in his own little fairy tale. His creative and happy life would come to an abrupt halt when his entire family is deported to a concentration camp during World War II. While locked up he tries to convince his son that the whole thing is just a game.
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The English Patient
🇮🇹 Italy 🇪🇬 Egypt 🇱🇾 Libya The 1940s The 1930sIn love, there are no boundaries. — In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.
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A Month by the Lake
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sFor 16 years Miss Bentley has been spending April at an elegant hillside villa on Lake Como. This year, 1937, her London society artist father has recently died and the only other English-speaking guests are brash Americans. Then Major Wilshaw arrives. He suggests they meet for cocktails and Miss Bentley stands him up -- not even thinking about it -- as she helps the new nanny of an Italian family settle in. Miss Beaumont, a tall, young American who has dropped out of finishing school in Switzerland, is bored and finds some amusement in flirting with the major, whose libido is awakened for the first time since before the great war. And Miss Bentley now finds more about the major to admire than his ears.
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Carrington
England 🇮🇹 Italy The 1930s The 1920s The 1910sA Love so Unusual it has to be True — Painter Dora Carrington develops an intimate but extremely complex bond with writer Lytton Strachey. Though Lytton is a homosexual, he is enchanted by the mysterious Dora and they begin a lifelong friendship that has strangely romantic undertones. Eventually, Lytton and Dora decide to live together, despite the fact that the latter has fallen in love with military man Ralph Partridge, whom she plans to marry.
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Porco Rosso
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930s The 1920s The 1910sA Pig's Got to Fly — In Italy in the 1930s, sky pirates in biplanes terrorize wealthy cruise ships as they sail the Adriatic Sea. The only pilot brave enough to stop the scourge is the mysterious Porco Rosso, a former World War I flying ace who was somehow turned into a pig during the war. As he prepares to battle the pirate crew's American ace, Porco Rosso enlists the help of spunky girl mechanic Fio Piccolo and his longtime friend Madame Gina.
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Captain America
Ohio District of Columbia California Alaska 🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇹 Italy The 1990s The 1940s The 1930sFrozen in the ice for decades, Captain America is freed to battle against arch-criminal, The Red Skull. — During World War II, a brave, patriotic American Soldier undergoes experiments to become a new supersoldier, "Captain America". Racing to Germany to sabotage the rockets of Nazi baddie "Red Skull", Captain America winds up frozen until the 1990s. He reawakens to find that the Red Skull has changed identities and is now planning to kidnap the President of the United States.
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Open Doors
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sTommaso Scalia is a man who commits three murders: he killed his superior who sacked him, he kills the man who replaced him, and he kills his own wife. He wants a quick trial and an early execution, but an earnest, principled assistant judge looks for a way to save the murderer from being shot, because he does not belive in capital punishment. Although he manages to save the man initially, he will pay a high price for it.
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
🇦🇹 Austria 🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇹 Italy New York Utah 🇵🇹 Portugal 🇹🇷 Turkey The 1930s The 1910sThe man with the hat is back. And this time, he's bringing his Dad. — When Dr. Henry Jones Sr. suddenly goes missing while pursuing the Holy Grail, eminent archaeologist Indiana must team up with Marcus Brody, Sallah and Elsa Schneider to follow in his father's footsteps and stop the Nazis from recovering the power of eternal life.
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I ragazzi di via Panisperna
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sThe enthusiasms, fears, joys and disappointments of the (private and professional) life of a well-known group of boys fond of physics and mathematics, who just made history as the Via Panisperna boys.
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Lion of the Desert
🇮🇹 Italy 🇱🇾 Libya The 1930s The 1920s The 1940sHe was a man of honor in a war without any. — This movie tells the story of Omar Mukhtar, an Arab Muslim rebel who fought against the Italian conquest of Libya in WWII. It gives western viewers a glimpse into this little-known region and chapter of history, and exposes the savage means by which the conquering army attempted to subdue the natives.
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A Special Day
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sA special film about two special people. — The film is set during the late 1930s: the occasion is the first meeting between Mussolini and Hitler. Left alone in her tenement home when her fascist husband runs off to attend the historic event, Antonietta strikes up a friendship with her neighbor Gabriele. As the day segues into night, Antonietta and Gabriele develop a very special relationship that will radically alter both of their outlooks on life.
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1900
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940s The 1930s The 1920s The 1910s The 1900sFrom the cradle to the grave - victims of history and change! — Set in Bertolucci's ancestral region of Emilia, the film chronicles the lives of two men during the political turmoils that took place in Italy in the first half of the 20th century.
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The Career of a Chambermaid
🇮🇹 Italy The 1940s The 1930sItalian comedy — This slight skewering of the mindset of the Fascist era when Italy’s “White Telephone” films (conservative minded sophisticated comedy-dramas revolving around the bourgeoisie) were in vogue gives Agostina Belli her best role – an ambitious Venetian girl that goes from chambermaid to prostitute to singer to film-star to mistress of ‘Il Duce’! – for which she received a special David Di Donatello award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar.
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Libera, My Love
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930sDirector Mauro Bolognini inserts this story in Fascist Italy, with careful attention to details. The couple formed by Matteo Zannoni (Bruno Cirino) and Libera Valente (Cardinale) can't bear fascism. They move constantly between cities, settling down in Modena, where Libera quickly collides with the fascist political commissar Franco Testa (Philippe Leroy). Libera has to suffer awful moments due to her attachment to the resistance, and to the political and sexual harassment from Testa.
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Amarcord
🇮🇹 Italy The 1930s The 1920sThe Fantastic World of Fellini! — In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.
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