Grimaldi, Aurelio

(1957-)

   Novelist, screenwriter, director. Grimaldi began as a writer in the late 1980s recounting his experience as a teacher in a Palermo juvenile prison. He subsequently adapted one of his novels set in a Sicilian reformatory as the screenplay of Marco Risi's Meryper sempre (Forever Mary, 1989), which received the Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes that year. This was followed by Ragazzi fuori (Boys on the Outside, 1990), effectively a sequel to Mery, which followed the lives of the young juveniles once they had been discharged.

   After scripting Uomo di rispetto (Man of Respect, 1992), one of Damiano Damiani's films on the Mafia, and providing the subject for Felice Farina's Ultimo respiro (The Last Breath, 1992), Grimaldi began writing and directing his own films, beginning with La discesa di Acld a Floristella (Acid's Descent into Floristella, 1992), a story about child labor and exploitation, and La ribelle (The Rebel, 1993), a portrait of Enza, a streetwise but sexually innocent 16-year-old juvenile, convincingly played by a young Penelope Cruz. After Le Buttane (The Whores, 1994), another hard-edged portrayal of the life of a group of Sicilian prostitutes, Grimaldi went even further with the provocative Nerolio. Sputerb su mio padre (Blackoil: I Will Spit on My Father), a fictional portrait of the last days of Pier Paolo Pasolini (made in 1996 but only released in Italy two years later). There followed Il macellaio (The Butcher, 1998) and La donna lupo (The Man-Eater, 1999) before Grimaldi returned to Pasolini with Un mondo d'amore (A World of Love, 2001), this time focusing on an earlier period of Pasolini's life. A year later, still obsessed with Pasolini, as he himself admitted, Grimaldi produced a contemporary Neapolitan remake of Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962) with his Rosa Funzeca (2002). The erotic-libertine dimension present in the earlier films was made more explicit in Grimaldi's most recent film, L'educazione sentimentale di Eugenie (The Sentimental Education of Eugenie, 2005), loosely adapted from the Marquis de Sade.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira