Il PostoMovies like Il Posto
- Key Features:
- Coming-of-age, Social commentary, Alienation, Loss of innocence, Workplace drama, Economic hardship, Romance, Italian cinema, Post-war Italy, Existentialism
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Fans of Italian cinema, Viewers interested in social commentary, Those who appreciate character-driven stories, Art house enthusiasts
- Emotional Arc:
- Hope → Disillusionment
Il Posto

With his family mired in financial troubles, Domenico moves to Milan, Italy, from his small town to get a job in lieu of furthering his education. A lack of options forces him to take a position as a messenger at a big company, where he hopes to receive a promotion soon. There, Domenico meets Antonietta, a young woman in a similar situation as himself. The two form a tentative relationship, but the soulless nature of their jobs threatens to keep them apart.
Il Posto
Having just moved back in with his working-class parents, twentysomething on-and-off philosophy undergrad Walter navigates turn-of-the-millennium Turin and Gen-X ennui.

Two very different men have something in common: the work. When their companies are bought by a bigger one, who will take the only place of boss of the new company?

25-year-old philosophy major Marta faces the ugly truth for many young Italians — a complete lack of career opportunities. While babysitting for single mother Sonia, she starts to work as a telemarketer, experiencing first-hand the fanatical and exploitative rat-race culture pushed on employees while quickly rising through the ranks of the company. Around her revolve people like delusional supervisor Daniela, her womanizing boss Claudio, fragile coworker Lucio "2", and well-meaning but inconsistent union rep Giorgio.

From childhood to fatherhood, Piero learns things the hard way while growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Livorno.

Professor Lipari teaches in a public school and is in a full-on existential crisis. He has no faith in himself and in the possibility of changing the world for the better. At school, a former student of his who is also a teacher will change his attitude.

An Italian laborer foils anyone who tries to stop him from selling espresso on the Milan-to-Naples night train.

In the immediate post-war period, amidst the rubble of a poverty-ridden Naples, two kids, Carmine and Celestina, try to survive as best they can by helping each other out. One night, they secretly board a ship bound for New York to reach Celestina’s sister, who emigrated to America several years earlier. The two children join the many Italian emigrants seeking a new life in America and arrive in an unknown metropolis, which, after several misadventures, they will learn to call home.

To avoid jail, a tax-dodging businessman is sentenced to a year of community service in a homeless shelter.

Simple Italian postman learns to love poetry while delivering mail to a famous poet; he uses this to woo local beauty Beatrice.

An aimless college graduate jumping from one job interview to another — killing time in between with his wisecracking and deadbeat room-mate — falls in love with an actress.

Riko is an honest and hardworking man who can count on a group of real friends and a loving wife. Things change after he loses his job and experiences a midlife crisis.

Michele, Goffredo, Mirko and Vito are four friends who have participated in the battles of the student in Sixties. Now in the Seventies, the four friends don't know what to do, though young and with so many possibilities to find a job in life. Intellectuals marginalized and misunderstood, the four friends find themselves when they can in a restaurant to discuss their outlandish theories. A girl named Olga disrupts their life, but Michele is her favorite, although he does not know what to do with the girl.

Three Italians travel to their hometown to vote for elections: Pasquale is a Southern immigrant living in Munich who's genuinely happy to come back to Italy, even if just for a few days, but the country he dreams of is far from reality; Furio travels to Rome with his family, but his niggling attitude threatens to push his wife Magda over the edge; young Mimmo is also going to Rome, but the trip is repeatedly interrupted by worries about his grandma's health.

Now in the Far North (i.e. Milan!), Alberto has accepted to manage a program for efficiency improvement in the Italian Post. He devotes all his time and all his energy to this noble task and neglects his wife Silvia, which of course annoys her beyond limits. Things do not fare much better in Castellabate where it is rather Maria, Matta's wife, who gets on his nerves by always blaming him for his lack of ambition. One day, due to a misunderstanding, Mattia is transferred to... Milan! And on whose doorstep does he land? Alberto's of course!

A bureaucratic snafu sends Marco Tullio Sperelli, a portly, middle-aged northern Italian, to teach third grade in a poor town outside Naples

Irene lives in Rome. When her mother ask to, she go back to Rimini, her hometown, to take care of her autistic brother, Omar. She soon discover that Omar knows very well what to expect from the future, but in order to achieve his dreams, he need to be independent, which is why Irene begins a tender crash course to teach him adult life.

A sugar-refinery worker flees his Northern Italy town after a woman refuses his marriage proposal.

Antonio's first day as a thief is marked by tears. During an incursion at the mall, his mother is arrested. Some 20 years later, Antonio along with his two inseparable friends, after some minor robberies, take on a post office. Things don't go as planned.

Set in Genoa, the film concerns the financial struggles and emotional strain that occur after Michele loses his job. He and his wife Elsa are forced to give up their affluent lifestyle and cope with the tensions of moving into a smaller home, finding new work, and making sacrifices.

A portrait of the flaws and peculiarities of four type of girls living in different districts of Rome.

When her social-climbing father is relocated from small-town North to his native Rome, 12-year-old Caterina enrolls to his old school, finding herself at sea with an environment where students sort themselves by social class and their parents' political affiliation.

A middle-aged man dissatisfied with the present state of things finds himself in a parallel universe where all technology is stuck in the 1990s.

Episodic journey of journalist Marcello who struggles to find his place in the world, torn between the allure of Rome's elite social scene and the stifling domesticity offered by his girlfriend, all the while searching for a way to become a serious writer.

When Debora's ex-husband, a popular neomelodic singer, loses his life in a stage dive, she worries that her 11-year-old son Ciro may be showing symptoms of depression. Taken to a child psychologist, shy Tommaso, Ciro eventually confesses to him that it's not his father's death that has got him down, it's love for his classmate, the cute Ludovica. The two make a deal: Tommaso will help Ciro to win the affections of Ludovica, while Ciro will give Tommaso a hand at having a chance with his mother.

Giuseppe Di Noi, an Italian surveyor living in Swiden, gets arrested at the border while going back to Italy with his family for a vacation. But can someone tell the man why?

The young priest Father Giulio returns to Rome, his hometown, after a long pilgrimage. Don Giulio hopes to live peacefully with his family and his friends, but discovers that many of them are depressed or frustrated, and some suicidal.

Alberto, post office manager of a small town in Brianza, under pressure of his wife Sylvia, is willing to do anything to get the transfer to Milan. Even pretending to be disabled to climb in the ranking. But the trick does not work and as punishment, he is transferred in a small town in Campania, which to an inhabitant of the north is equivalent to a nightmare ...

Once upon a time a wise and kind old woman discovers a baby in her cabbage patch. She brings up the child and, when she dies, the boy, Totò, enters an orphanage. Totò leaves the orphanage a happy young man, and looks for work in post-war Milan. He ends up with the homeless and organizes them to build a shanty town in a vacant lot. But when greedy developers threaten the community’s land, Totò will need all the help he can get in order to find an impossible way out.

Enrico is a struggling journalist in the Rome of 1945. He receives a phone call informing him that his younger brother Lorenzo has died. Enrico recalls their long and difficult relationship; he was brought up by their poor but warm-hearted grandmother, Lorenzo was raised as a gentleman by a wealthy local aristocrat. Reunited in the Florence of the 1930s, Enrico becomes his spoilt brother's keeper, forever haunted by a sense of guilty responsibility towards a man he both hates and loves.

Giulio suddenly finds himself having to change his life when his wife, after discovering his betrayal, asks for a separation and, suddenly, the reality around him is no longer the same. Forty years old and father of two children, Giulio is forced by circumstances to say goodbye to family and economic well-being and to study new solutions in order to stay afloat and not drown in a new poverty made of double rents and double bills to pay, solitary lunches in fourth-rate restaurants, children's wishes not to be ignored and creditors to hide from.

The life of a working-class boy in Rome through the '70s and '80s, choosing his own path with his friends and family.

In a high school in the outskirts of Rome, it's the last day before the summer holidays. A literature teacher reminisces the past year and wonders what will become of the students he cared for as if they were his children.

An Italian immigrant tries to make a new life in Switzerland, taking on a series of increasingly menial jobs in order to do it. He attempts to fit into his new home and society but fails at every turn. Unable to go home again, will his tenacity and optimism be enough to live on?

Vincenzo, a 30 years old apathetic and lazy man who still lives with his mother, has no job and no desire to improve. He meets Anna and fell in love with her but to keep the relationship alive he has to learn to accept more responsibility.

Margherita is a 14 year old living in Milano, who shares everything with her friends. They discuss clothes, music, school and that first kiss. A delightful coming-of-age film in which the here and now is all that really matters. Where every little thing is so very important and where feelings sometimes bubble over. In your teens, there’s no room for anything but friendship and love.

Michele Casali is a middle-class professor in Fascist Italy who teaches at the same high school attended by his only daughter, Giovanna. A shy and sensitive girl, her insecurities are only magnified by Michele's overprotectiveness—reaching a point of no return.

Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. Fausto, the group's leader, is a womanizer; Riccardo craves fame; Alberto is a hopeless dreamer; Moraldo fantasizes about life in the city; and Leopoldo is an aspiring playwright. As Fausto chases a string of women, to the horror of his pregnant wife, the other four blunder their way from one uneventful experience to the next.

A wealthy broker, Federico Picchioni, within two days forfeits his partner and work, finishing well to living with two children and granddaughter (abandoned by her father). He is, at this point, in the face of many difficulties of adjustment but finds comfort in the help of his neighbor.

Elementary school teacher Michele Cortese is about to start a whole new life. After 40 years of teaching in the metropolitan Roman jungle, he had to move to a village in Central Italy, to teach in a tiny school with just a few children aged 7-10. Struggling to overcome his urban inadequacy, he finds a friendly face in vice-principal Agnese and gradually manages to fit in, thanks to her and their spirited pupils. As everything seems to be falling into place, unwelcome news comes through: the school has failed to meet its student quota for the next year and will soon be shut for good.

The wealthy businessman Vincenzo realizes that he is a father too absent, but also that his two sons and 1aughter are spoiled and unable to support themselves economically. So Vincenzo stages their fraudulent bankruptcy and runs with their children in Taranto, in his old house. The boys are struggling to settle, but Vincenzo is confident about them and hope that they will soon find a job in the city. Meanwhile, an impostor blackmailer, who wants to marry the daughter of Vincenzo, arrives in Puglia, to expose the scam.

Paolo is a sceptical 30-year-old who works unwillingly as a sales clerk in a Turin department store. Mia is a back-up singer in a band and lives her life haphazardly, which leads her to being practically homeless. One night, they bump into each other by chance, in a gay club in Turin. It will be the beginning of an emotional adventure and a journey across the country looking for the father of Mia’s baby.

Lorenzo works for a rent-a-friend company. One day, his services are required for suicidial businessman Alberto.

After a hard day at work and a condominium-board meeting, accountant Ugo Fantozzi goes on a trip with his family. Unfortunately, he will face a nasty surprise upon his return.

Caterino is a worker at the Ilva factory in Taranto. When the company executives decide to use him as a spy to identify the workers they should get rid of, Caterino starts to track his colleagues, in search of reasons to report them. He then asks to be assigned himself to the Palazzino LAF where as punishment, some employees sit out their time with no job assignment. There he discovers that what looks like paradise is actually a strategy to psychologically break troublesome workers.

After a fateful encounter in the summer of 1966, the lifepaths of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family diverge, intersecting with some of the most significant events of postwar Italian history in the following decades.

A middle-aged man meets a young woman who is waiting on a canal bridge for her lover's return.

Ivan Mirosnikov, a cheeky young man in the Gorbachev era, is trying to figure out what to do with his life (he's not in college, and the 2-year mandatory military service is looming large ahead of him). Meanwhile, he lives with his divorced mother, and works as a courier at a Russian newspaper. Through his job, he meets patronizing Professor Kuznetzov and his rebellious daughter Katya. To annoy the professor, Ivan claims to have an affair with Katya. To his surprise, Katya backs his story up.

Mimmo is a construction worker who only wants to live in peace, but has to work as a debt collector for his uncle. Everything changes when he meets Tanya, a beautiful, street-smart girl who shares his dream.

Claudio is a construction worker living in the outskirts of Rome. He's happily married and his wife is pregnant with their third child. However, a dramatic event comes to upset this simple and happy life.

A group of former high school classmates meets for a reunion 15 years after graduation, only to discover that any innocence or friendship is long lost.

On a northern Italian farm, Batistì and his wife decide to send their son Minec to school, sacrificing his help in the fields but hoping to break the cycle of poverty in the family. But when Minec’s shoe breaks while walking for miles, Batisti puts the family’s future at risk to replace the clog.

Sevtap and Adem, the postman in the neighborhood, are in love with each other. Sevtap remained single until the age of 30 because no one liked her, so she is still a virgin and has settled for Adem. However, there is someone who opposes this love, her older brother Latif, who was raised in German culture but can be described as a complete fool. One day, Sevtap and Adem send a telegram from Sevtap's father's mouth to convince him to accept the situation. After this telegram, wedding preparations begin. However, during this time, Latif returns permanently from Germany to Turkey, and the truth about the couple is revealed. Latif opposes the marriage at any cost, even if it means harming Adem. Later, despite his reservations, he accepts the marriage and fulfills Adem's every request.

Purehearted teen Lazzaro is content living as a sharecropper in rural Italy, but an unlikely friendship with the marquise’s son will change his world.

Willy, Giacomo, Lorenzo and Sandro are 4 young yuppies rampant in the "Milano da bere" of the 80s, who live in the myth of Lawyer Gianni Agnelli and Silvio Berlusconi; their only purpose in life is to appear rather than be. Giacomo is an advertiser, Lorenzo is a notary, Sandro is a dentist, and Willy is a car salesman.

A young witch, on her mandatory year of independent life, finds fitting into a new community difficult while she supports herself by running an air courier service.

When Gelsomina, a naïve young woman, is purchased from her impoverished mother by brutish circus strongman Zampanò to be his wife and partner, she loyally endures her husband's coldness and abuse as they travel the Italian countryside performing together. Soon Zampanò must deal with his jealousy and conflicted feelings about Gelsomina when she finds a kindred spirit in Il Matto, the carefree circus fool, and contemplates leaving Zampanò.

April 24, 1993: it's the last broadcast of Radiofreccia, an independent radio station closing after 18 years, barely one minute before coming of age. Bruno, one of its founders, begins to tell its story, the story of a group of friends—especially troubled Freccia's—and a period of their youth in their small hometown.

This romantic drama by Michelangelo Antonioni follows the love life of Vittoria, a beautiful literary translator living in Rome. After splitting from her writer boyfriend, Riccardo, Vittoria meets Piero, a lively stockbroker, on the hectic floor of the Roman stock exchange. Though Vittoria and Piero begin a relationship, it is not one without difficulties, and their commitment to one another is tested during an eclipse.

Ayiva recently left his home in Burkina Faso in search of a way to provide for his sister and his daughter. He takes advantage of his position in an illegal smuggling operation to get himself and his best friend Abas off of the continent. Ayiva adapts to life in Italy, but when tensions with the local community rise, things become increasingly dangerous. Determined to make his new situation work he attempts to weather the storm, but it has its costs.

Fabio struggles with a cumbersome father and a capricious and spoiled little sister who consider him a good for nothing, a “vegetable” in fact. The unfortunate recent graduate looks for a job reacts to the contempt of his family and demanding employers, when an unexpected event remixes roles…

Giada is a overachieving student who works to pay for college. Riccardo is a spoiled brat who answers her tutoring ad in order to improve his abysmal grades. She's shy and homely. He's handsome and brazen. As they say, opposites attract.

In late 1940s Italy, a mother makes the difficult decision to send her son to the north, where he catches glimpses of a new life away from poverty.

Antonio, Peppino and Lucia are three brothers who live in the country near Naples. Lucia's son, Gianni, goes to Naples to study medicine, but there he knows a ballet dancer. They fall in love and, when she goes to Milan, Gianni follows her. Informed of this and afraid that their nephew will stop studying, the three Caponi brothers leave for Milan to persuade Gianni to come back and continue studying and abandon the "Malafemmina" (bad girl).

Giorgio and Tito, father and son. A successful journalist and a lazy teenager apparently impossible to understand. Giorgio's dream is to take Tito to the Nasca Hill in Liguria, but Tito prefers to spend his entire day with his group of friends, eating, talking about nothing and playing video games. Until one day when he suddenly informs his father that he would join him in this trip. After a series of accidents and misunderstandings, at the end, somehow father and son will find the way to communicate … or at least they will try.

Naples, Trajan's district. Initially it was intended for the inhabitants of the shantytowns on the seafront of Naples, who were homeless after the war. But it soon became a kind of ghetto. Alessandro and Pietro are two teenagers who film with an iPhone to tell their difficult neighborhood, their daily life, the friendship that binds them.

The adventures of the Milanese yuppies continue, always polished, "at home" in via Montenapoleone or at Nepentha, impeccable in dressing and "winning" at work, a little less in private life.

A man wakes up one morning with an annoying ringing sound in his ears. A note on the fridge says: "Your friend Luigi has died. P.S. I took the car". The problem is that he does not even remember who this guy Luigi is. This is just the beginning of a tragicomic day during which he will be plunged into the folly of the world. One of those days that changes your life forever.

Matteo is a young successful businessman, audacious, charming and energetic. Ettore instead, is a calm, righteous, second grade teacher always living in the shadows, still in the small town from where both come from. They’re brothers but with two very different personalities. A dramatic event will force them to live together in Rome for a few months, bringing up the opportunity to face their differences with sympathy and tenderness, in a climax of fear and euphoria.

In Palmi, a small town in Calabria, Don Vincenzo, a genial retired farmer, has a crazy idea to revive the local soccer team by organizing a bizarre fundraiser hiring the Italian major league Serie A, soccer player Etienne Morville, a bad-tempered guy but among the strongest in the world. Albeit unwillingly, Morville leaves Milan to move to Palmi and try to save his image. In the small town he will come up against a reality of sincerity, which will lead everyone on an unforgettable experience.

In an Italian seaside town, young Titta gets into trouble with his friends and watches various local eccentrics as they engage in often absurd behavior. Frequently clashing with his stern father and defended by his doting mother, Titta witnesses the actions of a wide range of characters, from his extended family to Fascist loyalists to sensual women, with certain moments shifting into fantastical scenarios.

A policeman who spies on the lives of others, an important banker married to a housewife who poses as a noblewoman. A precarious young masseuse and an electrician madly in love. Very different lives that end up intertwining. But also extremely complicated and troubled lives ... Even if, after all, life is a wonderful thing ...

A meek middle-aged man takes on every conceivable temporary job in order to feel useful and keep his dignity—until something shakes his inexhaustible optimism.

Lorenzo, who's 16 and born to a wealthy family in Parma, tries to make things right toward a showgirl, Aida, whom his older brother has mistreated. In extending kindness and standing up for her, he comes of age. But, is there anything he can do that will alter Aida's situation or her prospects?

Set in the small, mountainous village of Vermiglio during the waning days of WWII, a series of dramatic, consequential events unfold after the arrival of a taciturn Sicilian soldier, who hides out in town after deserting the army. While there, the soldier develops a romance with a provincial family’s eldest daughter.

A Russian poet, Andrei and his interpreter, Eugenia travel to Italy to research the life of an 18th-century composer.

After growing up in Switzerland, 13-year-old Marta returns to a city in southern Italy with her mother and older sister. Independent and inquisitive, she joins a catechism class at a local church. However, the games and religious pop songs she encounters there do not nearly satisfy her interest in faith. Struggling to find her place, Marta pushes the boundaries of the class, the priest, and the church.

Pio Amato, a 14 year-old member of a small Romani community in southern Italian town of Gioia Tauro in Calabria, is in a hurry to grow up. Pio follows his older brother Cosimo everywhere and from him he learns how to hustle and how to navigate the streets of his hometown. One night Pio sets out to prove to his brother that he is as good or better than him but, when things go wrong, a series of events will forever change the way he sees the world.

The destinies of two families are irrevocably tied together after a cyclist is hit off the road by a jeep in the night before Christmas Eve.

When elderly pensioner Umberto Domenico Ferrari returns to his boarding house from a protest calling for a hike in old-age pensions, his landlady demands her 15,000-lire rent by the end of the month or he and his small dog will be turned out onto the street. Unable to get the money in time, Umberto fakes illness to get sent to a hospital, giving his beloved dog to the landlady's pregnant and abandoned maid for temporary safekeeping.

Umberto Maria Durloni is a successful lawyer and a socialite who likes parties and a lavish life. He's got it all, except any ethical qualms.Only a step away from the top, his perfect world crumbles, showing him the brutal do downside to his life.

After receiving a large sum of money on his bank account by mistake, a small-town thirtysomething dissatisfied with his life sees the opportunity of turning back the clock to when things were good, reliving the carefree life of an university student in a big city. Here, he falls in love with a girl and gets her pregnant. There's just one problem: he already has a wife and a daughter back home!

A 40-year-old loser named Isidoro at the request of his brother drives from Italy to mountainous Carpathian village in Ukraine with a coffin of a diseased Ukrainian worker, who died at a construction site in Italy.

Maroso Golfetto, a firm manager from Veneto, is known for his frequent yelling at his employees, who are either immigrants or Southern Italians. He regularly appears on the local TV channel to denounce the evils of immigration, and his popularity extends to children. His speeches resonate more deeply with people than those of Lucia, their anti-racist schoolmistress. One morning, a miracle occurs: by invoking the help of God to rid Veneto of its immigrants, all the immigrants disappear. However, is this truly a blessing?

Valentino Tarocco invents a new life as a famous Milanese designer. He has removed all connection with the past, but an accident will bring him back to his twenties, causing him to recover his Apulian dialect and love for his origins.

Pio and Amedeo are inseparable friends, or at least they were until they graduated from high school, at which point each one was faced with the question: move up north or stay in the south?

Enrico is a corporate man whose job is to manipulate inexperienced scions into selling their flailing companies. His latest assignment proves more difficult than anticipated—since his target are two young siblings whose parents just died in a car accident.

Film director Blasetti is looking for a little girl for his new movie. Along with other mothers, Maddelena takes her daughter to Cinecittà, hoping she’ll be selected and become a star. She is ready to sacrifice anything for little Maria.

Dante, a pony express in serious debt, meets Nina, a hostess stuck in Torino for the night.

Twenty years after tragedy cut their graduation trip short, four friends return to that destination to finish what they started in 1980. However, as they find out, you can't repeat the past.

Salvo and Valentino are two happy Sicilian friends, who do not want to work, because they know that if they find a permanent job, their girlfriends will ask them to marry them.

Three Italian retirees embark on a journey to find a new country to live in.

Dumped by his girlfriend and finding himself stranded on different couches at friends’ places, Guido tries to transform his drift into an opportunity for a new beginning.

Juan and his urban family live in the Mexican countryside, where they enjoy and suffer a world apart. And nobody knows if these two worlds are complimentary or if they strive to eliminate one another.

Marco, a shy teenager, learns that he has... what it takes to be a great porn star, but he doesn't know how to tell his parents. Hell breaks loose when a neighbor finds a porn video of him and leaves it in his parents' mailbox.

A wealthy, self-absorbed Rome socialite is racked by guilt over the death of her young son. As a way of dealing with her grief and finding meaning in her life, she decides to devote her time and money to the city’s poor and sick. Her newfound, single-minded activism leads to conflicts with her husband and questions about her sanity.

Frustrated with their lack of upward mobility, some young Italians move to Cuba to start a wi-fi café and attempt to build a new life.

Paolo is an outgoing and handsome real estate broker married to Simona, a beautiful woman from the rough outskirts of Rome who has become an author of spicy bestsellers and is pregnant with their child. Betta, Paolo’s sister and her husband Sandro organise a dinner party with Paolo, Simona and their childhood friend, the eccentric musician Claudio. During the lively gathering Paolo reveals what he would like to name his son, causing reactions to steam up and a torrent of revelations to follow reaching climactic proportions.

Niko, a twenty-something college dropout, lives for the moment as he drifts through the streets of Berlin, curiously observing everyone around him and oblivious to his growing status as an outsider. Then on one fateful day, through a series of absurdly amusing encounters, everything changes.

