Paolo Taviani: Last News

Paolo Taviani, the iconic Italian director who helmed numerous films with his brother Vittorio, has died. He was 92.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Italian director Paolo Taviani, who with his late brother Vittorio formed the revered filmmaking duo that in 1977 won the Cannes Palme d’Or for “Padre Padrone,” has died at 92. Taviani died on Thursday in a Rome clinic after suffering from a short illness, according to Italian media reports. “Paolo Taviani, a great maestro of Italian cinema, leaves us,” Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Revered Italian auteur Paolo Taviani will soon be back in the director’s chair. Shooting is set to start in April on “Canto Delle Meduse,” a pandemic-themed drama helmed by Taviani with Polish-Italian actor Kasia Smutniak (“Domina”) attached to star. The rest of the film’s cast is being kept under wraps.

Naman Ramachandran The first trailer has been unveiled for “Walls” (“Mur”), actor-turned-filmmaker Kasia Smutniak’s directorial debut that will world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to a mass exodus of refugees seeking asylum across Europe. Among the European countries offering aid and refuge, Poland was particularly generous but the country had also simultaneously commenced the construction of Europe’s most expensive wall along its entire border with Belarus to deter further refugees from entering.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani directed films together from the early 1950s until Vittorio died in 2018, leaving his now 90-year-old brother to carry on alone. Leonora Addio, the second film Paolo has made without Vittorio, is not only dedicated to him but picks up many of the themes that ran through their earlier work, including their enthusiasm for theater in general and the writings of Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello in particular. The Berlin Film Festival competition entry looks and sounds sumptuous, but its two stories — both of which raise questions about what the living owe the dead — are disappointingly slight.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIt’s no spoiler to say that Luigi Pirandello dies nine minutes into “Leonora addio.” This alternately playful and lugubrious work of reflection isn’t really about the controversial Italian writer’s life at all, but rather his legacy, and in a less literal yet ineluctable sense, that of film directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.Over the course of half a century, the two cinematic siblings made movies together — including 1985’s “Kaos,” an omnibus-style collection of five Pirandello stories — bookending their career together by winning top prizes at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals (for “Padre Padrone” and “Caesar Must Die,” in respectively). And then, in 2018, Vittorio died.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentFour years after the death of his brother Vittorio, with whom he shared a celebrated career, Paolo Taviani is back in the Berlin competition solo, with “Leonora Addio.” The brothers won the Golden Bear in 2012 with “Caesar Must Die,” about high-security inmates performing Shakespeare.The free-form film he made –– screening on Feb. 15 –– takes its cue from a story titled “Il Chiodo” (“The Nail”) by Italian playwright and author Luigi Pirandello, written shortly before he died in 1936.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItaly’s robust 2022 Berlinale representation of a half-dozen titles runs the gamut from the latest works by venerable veterans Paolo Taviani and Dario Argento to pics by fresh new Cinema Italiano voices including Chiara Bellosi, whose first film, “Ordinary Justice,” launched from Berlin in 2020.Taviani, who is 91, is returning to Berlin but alone this time — his filmmaker brother, Vittorio, with whom he won a Golden Bear in 2012 for “Caesar Must Die,” passed away in 2018 — in competition with surreal drama “Leonora Addio,” inspired by a short story by Italian playwright and author Luigi Pirandello. Argento, who set his 1977 chiller “Suspiria” in Germany, will be at the Berlinale for the first time as a director with Rome-set suspenser “Dark Glasses,” though he was on the fest’s main jury panel in 2001.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentItalian director Roberta Torre, known for campy Mafia musical “Tano to Die For” and other anarchic pics, is making “Le Favolose,” about a group of transgender women who reunite after 20 years to commemorate a dead friend and do right by her after her identity has been violated.“Le Favolose,” which translates as “The Fabulous Ones,” is being produced by Donatella Palermo, who is at the Berlinale with auteur Paolo Taviani’s competition entry “Leonora Addio.”Palermo, who has a longstanding rapport with Torre, is the Italian producer behind two Berlin Golden Bear winners: the Taviani brothers’ “Caesar Must Die” and Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea.” “When a person decides to face the [gender] transition from man to woman it can be a very painful process in several different ways: social, physical, etc.,” said Palermo, who notes that “when a trans dies, most of the time their body is returned to their families.” Torre’s new pic is based on a real-life story of Antonia, one of the “Fabulous Ones,” who is buried by her family dressed as a man under her original name, Giampaolo, amid the indifference of most.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentBerlin Film Festival artistic director Carlo Chatrian on Wednesday unveiled the full lineup for the fest’s 72nd edition which he is hellbent on holding as an in-person event despite the global spread of the omicron variant, even after other top fests such as Sundance and Rotterdam have thrown in the towel and gone online.Chatrian spoke to Variety about the selection and what he expects his “exercise in resistance,” as he has called it, to be like on the ground in Berlin.Yes. Despite everything that is happening, the willingness and desire to be part of the festival on the part of production companies, sellers, actors and directors is very strong. I was even moved a couple of weeks ago when they told me that Paolo Taviani, who is 91, really wants to come at any cost. I think filmmakers are pining to be reconnected [with audiences] and the Berlinale even more than other festivals gives that sense, because you are at the center of a city.