2024-03-06 09:33:24
Director Paolo Taviani died this Thursday after a short illness. The classic of Italian cinema was 92 years old, ANSA reported. According to her, he fell asleep in the evening at a clinic in Rome surrounded by his family. A secular funeral is scheduled for Monday morning at Rome’s Protomoteca del Campidoglio.
Taviani formed a tandem with his brother Vittorio. They have shot over two dozen films, for which they have won awards at prestigious festivals since the 1970s.
Although Paolo Taviani studied art and Vittorio studied law, they started making short documentaries together already in the 1950s. Fame was brought to them by the film Padre padrone from 1977, for which they won the main prize of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival. He told about the rebellion of sons against fathers in the Italian countryside, or rather about the courage to break the age-old law of family obedience.
Vittorio Taviani and Paolo Taviani in 2012. | Photo: CTK / AFP
In the early 1980s, their war drama The Night of Saint Lawrence, in which Italians impatiently await the arrival of American liberators, won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize.
The Tavianis wrote film scripts together throughout their careers and also directed until late in life. In 2012, their prison documentary drama Caesar Must Die won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The brothers filmed it for six months in one of Italy’s toughest prisons, documenting how several men attempt to break into seemingly distant roles and act out William Shakespeare’s classic tragedy of Julius Caesar.
Taviani’s more recent works have also been praised, such as Boccaccio the Amazing from 2015, which was an adaptation of the Decameron, or the wartime Private Affair from 2017. It told the story of a partisan returning to an abandoned villa in the hills of Piedmont, where he fell in love with a beautiful girl as a student.
Vittorio Taviani died in 2018, he was 88 years old. Brother Paolo made Leonora addio as his last film the year before last without him, which was also shown in Czech cinemas. In it, three years after his brother’s departure, he returned to the works of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello, which the siblings adapted in the 1980s and 1990s. However, the new film focused not on Pirandello’s work, but on the last years of his life and subsequently on the fate of the urn with his ashes, which was transported from an overcrowded burial ground in Fascist Rome to Sicily. Various events accompanied its transport.
Video: Trailer for film Leonora goodbye
Paolo Taviani made his last film Leonora addio without his brother. | Video: Film Europe