TV Times

TV Times

‘Gianni Amelio’ film festival
Four films of Gianni Amelio, Le Chiavi Di Casa (Home Keys), Cosi Ridevano (The Way we laughed) Porte aperte (Open doors) and Lamerica were screened at the Auditorium of Public Trustee in Colombo recently.

Amelio was born in the small Italian village of San Peitro Magisano, a province of Catanzaro, at the end of World War II. Before Amelio’s second birthday, his 20-year -old father left his family and did not return for the next 17 years.

His grandfather, who took him on weekly outing to the cinema, raised the future director. When Amelio told his grandmother that he wanted to be a filmmaker, she urged him to go on to higher education. Amelio spent two and a half years studying Philosophy at a University in Sicily prior to dropping out. He thereafter moved to Roma and began assisting director Vittorio de Sica before leaving to work on spaghetti Westerns in Spain.

Gianni Amelio began making movies as a childhood game. Today he is an academy Award nominee and the only director to win three Felix AwardsCfor Best European Film. His unique directorial style is both passionate and austere, achieving vast emotion for the simplest of images and making him one of Europe’s most gifted modern filmmakers. Gianni Amelio is also the President of International Federation of Film Societies.

Amelio directed his first feature film, La fine del gioc (The end of the game) in 1970. He helmed several more works through out the 4 decade, including 1975’s II Cinema secondo Bertolucci (The Cinema according to Bertolucci) a documentary about the making of Bertoulucci’s 1990. In 1982, he co-wrote and directed the political thriller Colpire al cuore (Blow to the heart), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a man accused of terrorism. The picture was Amelio’s first feature to be widely screened in the United States and its success brought the director a host of other projects.

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