Amelio, Gianni

(1945-)

   Director and screenwriter. Having migrated to Rome from a small village in Calabria in 1965, Amelio began his career in cinema as assistant director to Vittorio De Seta on Un uomo a meta (Half a Man, 1966). He served a further apprentice-ship as assistant director to, among others, Gianni Puccini, Lina Wertmiiller, and Liliana Cavani while also making a number of short films and television advertisements. Having joined the RAI in 1970, he directed his first television feature, La fine del gioco (The End of the Game, 1970). His next major work, also made for television and financed by the RAI, was La citta del sole (The City of the Sun, 1973), a meditation on the social utopia imagined by the six-teenth-century monk Tommaso Campanella, in his book of the same name. Amelio next produced and directed Bertolucci secondo il cinema (The Cinema According to Bertolucci, 1975), a documentary on the making of Novecento, before making La morte al lavoro (Death at Work, 1978), a telefilm imbued with cinephilia that took its title from Jean Cocteau's remark, "Cinema is Death working on the actor." Il piccolo Archimede (The Little Archimedes, 1979), the adaptation of a short story by Aldous Huxley about a child musical prodigy, is regarded as the most accomplished of these early films made largely with television audiences in mind.

   Amelio's first work made specifically for the big screen came three years later with Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart, 1982), a film that tackled the theme of political terrorism through the exploration of a troubled father-son relationship. Although the film brought Amelio the recognition of a Nastro d'argento for Best Story, he returned to making shorts for several years before directing I ragazzi di via Panisperna (The Boys from Via Panisperna, 1988). Adaptated from a work by Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, I ragazzi was originally made as a three-hour television miniseries and suffered somewhat when it was cut by an hour for its theatrical release. However, Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1990), adapted from another work by Sciascia and exploring the moral quandaries of capital punishment, won Amelio both a Nastro d'argento and an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film. It was followed two years later by what is still widely regarded as his best film and, for many, the finest Italian film of the 1990s, II ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children, 1992). A powerful portrayal of the tenuous relationship that develops between a young carabiniere and the two children whom he has been charged to escort from Milan to Sicily, Ladro brought Amelio much international acclaim, including a nomination for the Palme d'or and the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, and in Italy two Silver Ribbons and a David di Donatello. This stunning achievement was followed by the equally impressive Lamerica (1994), a powerful and complex film set in the context of the downfall of the Communist regime in Albania, inherently juxtaposing what America had meant for Italian migrants in the 1950s with what Italy had come to mean for Albanians in the 1990s.

   Cost ridevano (The Way We Laughed, 1998), the story of two Sicilian brothers who migrate to Turin with tragic consequences in the late 1950s, was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice and compared favorably, in spirit if not quite in scope, with Luchino Visconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960). Returning to one of his favorite themes, the exploration of the father-son relationship, Amelio then made Le chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House, 2004), although, unusually for Amelio, the father's encounter with his handicapped child in this film is played out in Germany rather than Italy. This willingness to move outside Italy while retaining a commitment to a cinema of social conscience has been confirmed by Amelio's most recent film, La stella che non c'e (The Missing Star, 2006), adaptated from a novel by Ermanno Rea but filmed almost entirely in China.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira