In the wake of the celebrations of the beginning of cinema’s second century and a new millennium, the Harvard Film Archive presents a synoptic look at Italian filmmaking over the last decade as part of 2013, Year of Italian Culture in the United States. The eleven films in this program reveal an important national cinema that continues to renew itself even as it absorbs and honors its past. Throughout the history of cinema, the films of Italy have ranked among the most important and influential, from the groundbreaking epics of the 1910s through postwar neorealism, to the contributions decades later of Bertolucci, Wertmuller and the Taviani Brothers. Today new generations of directors are surveying a country marked by the rise of visual and social technologies, waves of immigration, deep-rooted regional differences, recent political scandals and a sputtering economy. These filmmakers do not make up one school but rather exemplify a number of traditions and styles, from realism to social melodrama to Fellinian grotesquerie, finding inspiration in a resilient culture constantly in dialogue with its own history and traditions while remaining open to the future. — David Pendleton