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Marcielle, known as Tielle, is 13 years old and lives with her family on an island in the Amazon rainforest. The only realities she knows are her house on stilts where everyone sleeps in the same room, the water and the pristine Amazon rainforest, the school, the church, and the store where you get what you need. There are no possible escapes, in her life, except in the barges that ply the river on which young and beautiful girls like Tielle can make some money (in what way is easy to figure out). At home they all sleep together in hammocks, but when Tielle's hammock breaks her father gladly houses her in his bed, and no one can say anything because there is nothing to say. Nor can anything be said when the father goes hunting in the thick of the Amazon rainforest taking only Tielle with him as help. The great merit of this story of child abuse is that the director talks about the violence without ever showing it directly, but making its characteristics and its immovability very clear. Violence in the family is there and is not discussed; it is seen as a natural fact that cannot be changed. Nor can the local police do much to help Tielle. The little girl will have to help herself, and she will do so with a lot of courage and determination. So much beauty (the unspoiled nature of the Amazon and Tielle herself, the beautiful young actress Jamile Correa) coexists with so much violence: but the film opens to hope, and that is another virtue of it.

Fine film, produced and directed by Paul Newman and based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel. Impeccable screenplay (by Alvin Sargent), wonderful music with melancholy and reflective tones by Maurice Jarre, intense acting by Joanne Woodward.

Beatrice is a widow with two teenage daughters. The house where she lives is kept in total disarray, the patio is full of trash, her car could use a good wash. Beatrice is a failure and knows it, hates the world and seeks opportunities for redemption that no one offers her. Cynical and scornfully ironic, she commiserates with herself and despises others. Her daughters, Matilda and Ruth, could not be more different. Matilda, 13, has a passion for science, goes to school with the pleasure of learning things that make the world a fascinating adventure for her, and is sweet-natured and reserved, endowed with an inherent humanity that makes her view with favor even the elderly tenants her mother takes in as tenants, almost always people who are sick and near death, left there by relatives who want to get rid of them. Ruth, 17, experiences all the problems of being a teen-ager, but she also suffers from seizures, perhaps also due to the strong psychological pressure of living with a neurotic, narcissistic and selfish mother, forced by lack of money to care for all these elderly people who go to die in her house. Beatrice's only chance to rise morally from her hellish life is to constantly think back to the past, idealize her cheerleading adolescence, and plan important projects to accomplish which she has neither the determination nor the money to do. In this utterly negative context Matilda nevertheless manages to keep her optimism, her love of life, and her irrepressible interest in knowledge intact. She is entrusted with the film's final word: "Every atom in me, in all of us, comes from the sun, from places that are beyond our dreams: the atoms of our hands, those of our hearts. Atom, atom, what a wonderful word...No mom, I don't hate the world." Paul Newman gave his daughter, who plays the character of Matilda, a beautiful and intense character that generates love.

There can be no religious experience without a deep empathy with creation. That's what one thinks of upon leaving this extraordinary film directed by Pema Tseden, a Tibetan filmmaker and writer who died of heart problems in May 2023. This is his penultimate film, and it tells the story of a shepherd who has locked a snow leopard in his sheep pen and, overnight, slashed the throat of nine of them. Now the shepherd threatens to kill the leopard if he is not compensated. Opposed to his decision, however, are the old father (representative of the traditional values of Tibetan culture) and his younger brother, a young monk, who offer what they hold most dear (the father all the money set aside for a pilgrimage to Lhasa with his monk son, the latter his precious camera, with which he loves to photograph animals, and in a dream scene his own life) for the animal's safety. Finally, even the authorities arrive to reiterate that the animal must be freed because it is protected by law. The film, for its emotional intensity and deep spirituality, stands out as the best feature film seen at this 80th Venice Film Festival. Also beautiful are the two dream scenes of the young monk, shot in splendid black and white, where the relationship between man and animal becomes so profound that we can glimpse the Creator behind his creatures, when (as in this case) the lives of man and animal manage to interpenetrate with such sublime harmony. Unmissable.