When that craving for stimulating, hard-to-find or just plain super-fabulous cinema strikes, the first place film buffs head for, to practically no one's surprise, is Tampa Theatre or Sunrise Cinemas in Tampa, and Burns Court in Sarasota.

As it happens, though, there's another cine-centric hot spot in Tampa Bay. A movie mecca where, on almost any given week, you can see blazing masterpieces often considered too challenging, too obscure, too old or too, well, foreign for even our most forward-thinking theaters.

And did we mention that it's free?

For the past year or so, many of the very best films shown in the Bay area have played at one place and one place only — at Eckerd College's International Cinema Series in St Petersburg. Over the past few months alone, and with all too little fanfare, this weekly series has screened glorious 35mm prints of absolute winners like Whisky (an Uruguayan comedy of middle-aged manners that bests Broken Flowers drollery for drollery); Howl's Moving Castle (Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki's stunning follow-up to Spirited Away); and the politically charged, 1969 Marlon Brando epic Burn!

Just last week, the series presented French director Arnaud Desplechin's hugely ambitious Kings and Queen, which might just be the best film of the year.

The International Cinema Series raises the ante even further this week for the final film of its fall season, with one of its greatest coups yet: The Best of Youth (La Meglio Gioventu), a magnificent epic from Italy that spans nearly 40 years in the lives of its characters and six hours of real time. Don't be alarmed, though; the movie's six hours feel significantly shorter than, say, Saw II's 93 minutes, and there's a good chance you'll leave the theater wishing it had gone on for an hour or two more.

With the sweep and richness of a great, hefty novel, The Best of Youth chronicles Italian life from the early '60s to the present, focusing on Nicola Carati (Luigi Lo Cascio) and his brother Matteo (Alessio Boni), as well as assorted friends and family members. The movie is inevitably filled with history, but is a world apart from one of those glib Forrest Gump-ian odysseys that gratuitously place their characters in a political-cultural context just to amuse us with some quaintly antiquated fashions and attitudes. Best of Youth is the real deal, intricately grounded in the process of characters being shaped in time by their environment and in turn shaping those environments.

The first part of the film introduces us to its characters, establishing the personalities and habits of the Carati brothers and following them from impressionable young students in 1963 to ripened thirtysomethings in the 1980s.

Handsome but broody Matteo initially appears to be the more promising of the brothers, but his dreams soon shatter when his noble but ill-conceived rescue of an abused mental patient leads to calamity for nearly everyone involved. Disillusioned and deeply confused, Matteo turns his back on college and joins the army, even as brother Nicola goes on to become the person Matteo seemed destined to be, opening his heart and mind to new people and places, and eventually getting into some serious flirtation with the burgeoning counter-culture.

The Best of Youth might seem to be setting us up for a dueling siblings scenarios, with fascist pig Matteo playing Cain to hippie activist Nicola's Abel, but the movie is too smart and too subtle to allow that to happen.

Instead of an overheated East of Eden approach we get a gently but intricately nuanced look at two brothers who, despite their obvious differences, love each other truly, madly, deeply (transpose the genders and the relationship wouldn't be at all out of place in many a chick flick).

The bond between Nicola and Matteo is the central thread running through all six hours of The Best of Youth and, although the brothers slip in and out of each other's lives over the years, their dovetailing destinies give the movie a metaphysical weight not unlike one of those great Kieslowski films like The Double Life of Veronique, where one human life fulfills another.

Characters enter and exit the story and then re-enter again (although some depart forever); weddings, funerals and births occur; friendships form and dissolve; children grow up; and all of the characters rise and fall and forever find themselves transforming.

The stately groundwork of the movie's first part is followed by a second part where all of the pieces come together in immensely satisfying and often devastating ways. There are tragedies here, of course, but the movie's tears are all well earned. If The Best of Youth occasionally seems like a soap opera, then it's certainly one of the best soap operas ever.

There's another connection to the soap opera angle. Curiously enough, The Best of Youth started life as a mini-series for Italian television that was never broadcast for various mysterious reasons. Thanks to ecstatic receptions at Cannes and at other stops on the international film festival circuit, however, Best of Youth has found its niche, in spades, on the big screen. The domestic distributor, Miramax, in typically sinister fashion, reportedly sat on the film for two years before releasing it, but it's here now so be thankful for favors large and small.

In keeping with its small screen origins, The Best of Youth concentrates heavily on close-ups, avoiding visual information and details that might clutter a modestly-sized image and confuse its focal point. This stripped-down approach results in a refreshingly direct and emotionally powerful style when transposed to a larger screen — a poetry of the human face that, at its best, carries an elegant wallop recalling the great films of the silent cinema. A face is never just a face in The Best of Youth, but an invitation to look inside.

The film tells its story mostly through these faces, calmly, confidently and through small moments in times of great significance. It's an epic, for sure, but an epic that, much like one of its no-longer-young characters, has outgrown the need for exclamation points.

The Best of Youth doesn't need to breathlessly exclaim the importance of each and every moment, because it knows all of them are.

This article appears in Dec 7-13, 2005.