Cinema Made in Italy: Five films not to miss

The seventh edition of London's annual celebration of the best Italian cinema returns next month.

Cinema Made in Italy will run from 1 to 5 March at the South Kensington Ciné Lumière cinema, and will offer up some of the most exciting, moving and inspiring Italian films from the past year.

This year's line-up comprises nine new feature films, plus the recently restored version of Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece The Battle of the Algiers.

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Each screening is followed by Q&A sessions, offering audiences the chance to talk directly with the filmmakers.

Here's five films not to miss:

At War with Love (In Guerra per Amore) directed by Pierfrancesco Diliberto

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Following on from The Mafia Kills Only in Summer, famed Sicilian director and actor Pierfrancesco Diliberto (also known as Pif) brings to London his dramatic comedy with a historical setting.

The year is 1943, and Arturo (Pif) is in love with beautiful fellow Italian, Flora (Miriam Leone), who is however promised to the son of a New York mafia boss. The girl's father lives in a small town in Sicily, and to ask his permission for his daughter's hand in marriage in person, Arturo's only option is to enlist in the US army, which is preparing to travel to the island to fight Nazi fascism.

Described as "Forest Gump landing in Sicily" by [4]CineEuropa the touching comedy has already won plaudits at last year's Rome Film Festival.

"Pif develops the effective mask of a simpleton, almost a Shakespearian fool, [to reach] the younger generations that go to the cinema, communicating powerful and sophisticated ideas," adds the website.

7 Minutes, (7 Minuti) directed by Michele Placido

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Following a takeover, the new owner of an Italian textile plant (played by Elle's Anne Consigny), flies in from Paris to oversee the plan to preserve the workers' future.

When the women in the plant's council learn that nobody will lose their job, provided everyone gives up seven minutes of their daily break, it seems too good to be true. But when they start to analyse what the seven minutes actually represent, it soon dawns on them that more is at stake than merely their workers' rights.

"An unapologetically political parable," says Variety, 7 Minutes is also an "investigation into group dynamics, and a brisk education in labour vs capital."

Michele Placido's twelfth feature as director comes with all the maturity you'd expect, adds the magazine.

Placido's experience shows in the "strong performances he elicits from his almost-all-female cast, which includes actresses of little prior experience rubbing shoulders with veterans like Ottavia Piccolo and perennial ingenues like Clémence Poésy."

The Confessions, (Le Confessioni) directed by Roberto Ando

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Roberto Andò's slick mystery thriller centres on a simple monk of the Carthusian order, who shakes things up at a G8 meeting held in a luxury hotel on the Baltic Coast. A race against time (and the International Monetary Fund) sees a good-natured religious figure thrown into a plot to destroy the economic development of the world's poorer countries.

But it's not all high-octane stuff as "there is much to chuckle over as the plodding, plotting politicos are outmanoeuvred by the monk's sheer goodness," says The Hollywood Reporter.

The casting is also something to behold, notes the website.

Daniel Auteuil as the fictional director of the IMF looks "appropriately rich, portly and all-powerful in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn mode," THR says.

The film's beautiful setting is superbly complimented by Nicola Piovani's award-worthy score which is at once lush and ironic.

Pawn Street (Le Ultime Cose), directed by Irene Dionisio

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Set in Turin, the clever ensemble piece Pawn Streets reveals an insider's view of the goings on behind the closed doors of a local pawnbrokers and the wheeling and dealing which takes place in the streets outside.

Director Dionisio, who is also a documentary filmmaker, succeeds in rendering an honest account of some of the unfortunate circumstances that bring people to pawn their most cherished belongings.

Inevitably the lives of the film's seemingly separate protagonists become intertwined, concluding in a tragic epilogue.

SLAM (Tutto per una ragazza), directed by Andrea Molaioli

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Based on the successful novel by British writer Nick Hornby and set in the mould of Sliding Doors, SLAM sees 16-year-old skateboarding obsessive Sam forced to grow up fast when his girlfriend reveals she is pregnant. Turning to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk for advice, Sam is thrown into different versions of his future in order to make the right decisions in his present.

Molaioli's first feature film in the director's chair is helped immensely by another stellar performance from Luca Marinelli as Sam's father. The italian actor has won numerous awards for his work in Italian cinema, most noticeably for crossover hit The Grand Beauty in 2013.

Times of the screenings plus information on how to book tickets to the talks can all be found on the Cine Lumiere website.