Thirty Short Italian Expressionist Films About the Seaside

• An ailing doctor on curative sabbatical meets a man playing a double-role as the Mysterious Waiter and the Ominous Oyster Salesman (the duality of Eros and Thanatos, but of course).
• A young witch mixes sand, blood and olive oil for a dawn seaside ritual. The sun rises on a voodoo sand doll.
• She says no, he says why not, she says well then, he says don't be petty, she says enough of this cosmetic conversation, he says let's sit, she says and wait for what, etc. etc. etc.
• A gelato salesman is not optimistic about business on this last day of summer.
• A seaside squall keeps three generations of vacationing women in a beach cabin. Tired allusions to Chekhov ensue.
• An Angolan lad and a Chinese girl have only a sketchy Esperanto as a shared language, as they dally and tarry amongst the waves.
• An empty boat sinks. A seagull mourns. Close-up shot of fish entrails.
• A woman, apparently a recent divorcee, is inconsolable as her mother attempts in turn to sympathize and reason with her, interspliced with time-elapsed shots of ants devouring a peeled orange on the pavement.
• A hotel banquet is ruined by a nasty tiff between an imperious maitre d' and a long-suffering waiter.
• Two Armenian businessmen plan a venture of dubious legality while the body of a refugee washes ashore in the background.
• A wig blows about the beach, briefly changing the personalities of people as it lands on their heads - often with hilarious results.
• A boy chases after seagulls while his mother entertains the notion of a tryst with a foreign banker in Speedos.
• An old woman slowly tosses an aged bundle of love letters into the sea one by one while recalling the war years.
• A fashionable young woman with a haughty Florentine accent causes a scene wearing a bikini made of bananas and diamonds.
• Three dogs sniff and snoop about the carcass of a giant washed-up fish while a quartet of aging street musicians performs in a ruined building.
• A mix-up involving two near-identical pleasure boats puts a young man in danger of losing his virginity.
• A countess finds her reputation ruined by the discovery of a forgotten peccadillo.
  
• An aging Colombian novelist and a young Algerian boy muse in French about intransigence.
  
• Two hitmen reflect how their lives might have been different, over substandard cappuccinos.
• The aquarium becomes a garden of delights to a young woman awakening to her potent sexuality.
• Two old, old women in all-black complain about everything for a long, long time.
• A sailor gone AWOL tries to get rid of a cache of ivory he's smuggled ashore. The sound of African drums haunts him everywhere he goes.
• The objects that fall out of beach-goers' pockets reveal intimacies about their owners' lives.
• Five boys around a midnight beach fire imagine they're castaways and tell ghost stories, until one goes too far.
• After his near-drowning, a woman realizes her son no longer belongs to her. Music by Puccini.
• An American lunch-meat magnate decides life is passing him by and resolves to study Renaissance painting.
• A barber reveals that the condition of most people's scalps disgusts him, and that he can only be aroused by the sight of a woman's hat in an empty room.
• A strange infestation of stinging jellyfish causes a small resort town to re-examine its past and fear for its future.
• A successful Kurdish photographer on holiday is slowly driven to madness by what he describes in endless letters to his mistress as "an overabundance of form."
• The sun rises on a shore that remains resolutely empty for a very long shot. Sounds of gulls and distant machinery. The voice of a gruff young man off-camera picked up by a wind-swept boom mike announcing, "There are no fresh ones to be had this time of year" abruptly ends the film.