The Forbidden City

Mei comes to Rome looking for her sister. The trail leads to a restaurant in the Esquilino district called La Città Proibita, which is also where women are sold. She meets the son of a restaurant owner buried in debt, a young man waiting for his own missing father, and the two have to understand each other without a shared language. Gabriele Mainetti has made a kung fu film set in Rome, and the strange combination holds. The fights are taken seriously, and Yaxi Liu's physical performance is the spine of the picture. Enrico Borello, Marco Giallini, Sabrina Ferilli and Luca Zingaretti fill out the cast. It opened on 13 March 2025 and took seven nominations at the seventy first David di Donatello awards, including best director. The flaw is the mixture. Placing something as heavy as human trafficking inside genre machinery tilts the tone in places, and the gangster material drifts toward cliche. Who it is for: viewers who like Italian films that blend genres. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the subject handled realistically.