Luigi Di Gianni

Luigi Di Gianni (born in Naples on October 20, 1926 and died in Rome on May 10, 2019) is an Italian screenwriter and director. Luigi Di Gianni believes in the power of cinema. It is this spirit, tragic and rogue, that has always possessed him. And that makes his films an experience difficult to forget in any hurry. It is an insinuating spirit, which ends up delighting and even tormenting the spectator, at first alien to her. It has multiform and unpredictable tentacles, which evade the safety of easy classification. Every time one tries to venture a definition, one has the suspicion of falling into reductionism, as if something is always missing. Starting with an inevitable question, however tedious it may seem: can we be content to speak, in his case, about documentary cinema? If asked, Di Gianni would certainly answer with a peremptory no, and for good reason. His is a decidedly authorial cinema. It is crossed by cultural and intellectual tensions that embrace literature, music, philosophy and great cinema. It is sustained by a sometimes unsatisfied desire to control rhythms, atmospheres, sounds, lights, movements… Above all, it is driven by the conviction that cinema is an expressive instrument that offers us a vision (turned black) of man and the world. And yet it is clear that few filmmakers have been able to document in such depth some of the most surprising, heartbreaking and disturbing aspects of our society, especially those rooted in the atavistic miseries of the…