Italian Archives – Laemmle Theatres

In 1970s Rhode Island, all cold grays and blues, a mother dies in hospital, and her estranged adult daughter barely feels anything. In a 1930s moshav in British Mandate Palestine, all vibrant colors as memories tend to be, a widower hires an attractive newcomer to be his housekeeper. These are different women, yet their stories entwine a family mystery in Guido Chiesa’s For the Love of a Woman.

Catch For the Love of a Woman at Laemmle’s Royal and Town Center 5 starting Friday, July 10^th. Star Mili Avital will participate in Q&A’s after the 7:00 p.m. Royal show on July 11, as well as the 1:00 p.m. TC5 show and the 4:00 p.m. Royal show on July 12.

For the Love of a Woman is loosely based on Meir Shalev’s novel The Loves of Judith, also known as As a Few Days or The Four Meals, but it adds a lot in the adaptation. Only the scenes set in the ’30s are from the novel, though the format of nesting stories remains the same, turning the book’s wraparound narrative into the story being uncovered by the new framing device, set 40 years later and invented for the film. Director Chiesa, an Italian immigrant who worked with Michael Cimino and Jim Jarmusch, has turned the story from a riff on Jewish folktales to a meditation on the immigrant experience. What does a person lose when they leave the homeland…and how might they find it again?

Mili Avital, the acclaimed Israeli actress whose Hollywood breakthrough was as the female lead in Stargate, plays Esther, a middle-aged woman who is handed a mystery upon her mother’s death. Prior to succumbing to dementia she left Esther a letter and a piece of jewelry, telling her to take it to Israel and look for the name “Judith.” With the assistance of a family friend who lives there, she discovers an old farmhouse, and under pretense of wanting to buy it, meets the heir, a university professor (Ori Pfeffer) whose actual given name is Zayde, or “Grandpa.”

As Esther asks more questions about the house, Zayde reveals his own family history, mostly focusing on the quirky circumstances that led to his having three fathers. All of them pined for one woman, Yehudit, or Judith (played by Romanian actress Ana Ularu), who had a secret backstory of her own. Moshav communities, like kibbutzes, involve shared resources and collectivism; this story humorously suggests that might extend to women too. Yet Yehudit is nobody’s property; she owns her sexuality, and the men eventually fall in line. Especially when she gives birth to Zayde (standing up, no less!), without knowing which of her triptych of lovers is the dad. “Who does he look like?” they ask. “Me,” she responds.

Chiesa’s filmography consists primary of Italian films, sometimes depicting political/historical moments, as in Working Slowly (Radio Alice) or Johnny the Partisan, and sometimes comedies both romantic and family-related, like 30 Nights With My Ex or Belli di Papa. Taking on an English-language movie about the Israeli immigrant experience is a bold leap, but he draws on his experience with both family complications and political history, along with his own experience as an import, to reveal that sometimes there is universality in the specifics.

Ties to two cultures can make a person’s life feel divided; different people bridge the divide in different ways, but it all stems from the same root feeling. One need not be either Italian or Israeli to connect to the journeys Esther and Zayde take, and their realizations that key elements of their pasts have been missing. For the Love of a Woman reveals that there may be sorrow in the lost connections, but there’s joy in making new ones, and the former can directly fuel the latter.

“With a moving story, beautiful direction and a cast and crew that execute with precision this is a film not to be missed.” – Ricky Archuleta, Film Threat

“Some films sweep you away with breathtaking action. Others quietly capture your heart. For the Love of a Woman belongs firmly in the second category, blending romance, mystery and family history into a thoughtful, emotionally rewarding film.” – Mira Temkin, Splash

Nearly two thousand years after Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii in ash, the volcano remains, less a relic than a constant, ambient presence. In Pompei: Below the Clouds, director Gianfranco Rosi turns his gaze toward the modern communities that live in Vesuvius’ shadow, culminating in a study of daily life shaped by history, haunted by catastrophe, and suspended between past and present.

Catch Pompei: Below the Clouds in theaters beginning March 13th at the Laemmle Royal.

Rosi is no stranger to immersive, place-based filmmaking. The Golden Lion-winning Sacro GRA and the Golden Bear recipient’s Fire at Sea established him as one of contemporary cinema’s greatest observers, an artist whose documentaries feel at once intimate and planetary. Shot over three years in and around Naples, Pompei: Below the Clouds may be among his most humane works, yet it hums with unease. Vesuvius does not dominate the frame; instead, it lingers in the background, a calm but potentially devastating fact of life.

Working in luminous black-and-white cinematography, Rosi captures a Naples veiled in silvery cloud and sea mist. Fumaroles exhale pale steam near the volcano’s summit while, down below, the city exhales its own brands of smoke: industrial plumes, street fires, and the everyday combustion of urban existence. The threat of disaster, natural or human-made, never quite recedes.

Elsewhere, archaeologists carefully brush dirt from newly unearthed bones in Pompeii’s ruins, while police pursue tomb robbers tunneling through the storied soil. In a museum basement, a curator tends to long-buried statues and fragments as if they were old friends. “Time destroys everything, but it also preserves everything,” one historian reflects, a sentiment that becomes the film’s quiet thesis.

With its spare, tactile soundscape—blending music with the subterranean murmurs of earth and water—Pompei: Below the Clouds listens as much as it observes. Rosi isn’t interested in spectacle; he’s attentive to rhythms, textures, and the fragile balance between endurance and collapse. The film ultimately suggests that living beneath Vesuvius is less about fearing apocalypse than about negotiating coexistence with it. Past and present aren’t opposites here but layers, compacted together like geological strata. In patiently recording how people work, worry, study, remember, and simply pass the time, Rosi masterfully paints a portrait of a community suspended between memory and possibility, where history is not a distant chapter but a daily companion.

“An intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his [Italy-focused] triptych.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“As a filmmaker, Rosi acts as both guide and preservationist, making movies that may one day be uncovered like statues below ground, dug up by future archeologists trying to grasp how we lived.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“There are many ways to live around an active volcano, and this humming, keen-eyed film is interested in all of them.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

Mystery and the Immigrant Experience in Guido Chiesa’s ‘For the Love of a Woman’

Living With the Volcano: Rosi’s Mesmerizing ‘Pompei: Below the Clouds’

Laemmle Theatres