When American moviegoers hear the phrase “Italian film,” Millicent Marcus, founder of Yale’s annual New Italian Film Festival, encourages them to think outside the black-and-white, neorealist box of 1960s classics by major directors like Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, and Pasolini.

For the 14th year running, the festival invites the Yale and New Haven communities to celebrate the more colorful, less widely distributed contemporary cinema of Italy, and to correct “the mistaken impression that Italian cinema is in decline,” said Marcus, who is also professor of Italian and of film studies at Yale.