The Great Ambition

Jasmine is 40 and has everything she ever wanted: a devoted husband, three loving sons, and a thriving hair salon just south of Naples. But after her father’s death, she experiences a recurring dream in which a young girl runs into her arms, offering Jasmine a new sense of fulfilment and completeness she can’t ignore. She decides to follow her dream of a daughter and dives headfirst into the challenging world of international adoption – risking her marriage, her sons’ well-being, and her own moral compass along the way. The entire family is in crisis, until they finally realize that the only way out is together.

At the end of a brilliant career across the most prominent courts of late medieval Italy, legendary master at arms, Fiore dei Liberi, reminisces about some key episodes of his action packed life and teaches a skeptical young scribe a valuable lesson on survival while supervising the creation of his renowned “Fior di Battaglia” (The Flower of Battle) treatise on combat, which is studied worldwide today.

After a suicide attempt, Lane has moved into her country house to recuperate. Her best friend, Stephanie, has come to join her for the summer. Lane's mother, Diane, has recently arrived with her husband Lloyd, Lane's stepfather. Lane is close to two neighbors: Peter, and Howard. Howard is in love with Lane, Lane is in love with Peter, and Peter is in love with Stephanie.

Luca is a forty-year-old teacher experiencing a relationship crisis with his wife, Sara, who is much wealthier than him. During the lockdown, Luca finds himself a bystander in the life of his new neighbor, Amanda, and decides to bridge the distance between them, with disastrous consequences.

A boy escaped from home, listening, crouched in the depths of his hiding place, the cries of the men who seek him. When the game passes, what remains before him is an infinite and arid plain that he must cross if he wants to get away definitively from what has made him flee. His steps will intersect with those of a pastor and, from that moment, nothing will be the same for either of them.

As Islamic morality squads stage arbitrary raids in Tehran and as fundamentalists seize hold of the universities, Azar Nafisi, an inspired teacher, secretly gathers six of her most committed female students to read forbidden western classics. Unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, they soon removed their veils, their stories intertwining with the novels they read: just like the heroines of Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James or Jane Austen, the women in Nafisi’s living room dare to dream, hope and love as we experience the complexity of the lives of individuals facing political, moral and personal siege.

Peppino is an aging taxidermist mocked for being short and sleazy who meets Valerio, a handsome if artless young man fascinated by his work. Euphoric, Peppino offers him a large salary to come work as his assistant, with the job burgeoning into a budding friendship Peppino mistakes for something more. But when Valerio meets Deborah, their fledgling romance is threatened by an insanely jealous third wheel.