Born in Arona, on Lake Maggiore, in 1987. He became passionate about photography, painting and moving images already during his classical studies. He moved to Milan for university studies. Here he attended his first sets – commercials and video clips – as electrician and video assistant. He obtained a master’s degree in Cinema and Videoart at IULM University with the thesis Body, power, time. The tetralogy of Aleksandr Sokurov – speaker prof. Gianni Canova. In Rome he graduated in Photography at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia under the direction of maestro Giuseppe Lanci.
After the first years in the camera department and numerous Dop shorts, including The Delay by Mattia Napoli, which won the Cortinametraggio Film Festival, he made his photography debut with the film Europa by Haider Rashid. It is the story of a boy who crosses the border between Turkey and Bulgaria – following the “Balkan route” to reach Europe – and fights to survive in the Bulgarian woods, hunted by “migrant hunters”. The hand-held camera follows the protagonist – Adam Ali – entirely in close up in that liminal and hostile environment, crawling with him, climbing trees, going up mountain rivers. Europa participates at Cannes Film Festival 2021 – Quinzaine des realisateurs, where it won the Independent Critics Award.
The next film hybridizes documentary language and aesthetics with the fiction film: Luce by Silvia Luzi and Luca Bellino is the stalking of a shy girl – Marianna Fontana – who works in a tannery and obsessively tries to find her father through an unlikely telephone relationship. The film takes shape between fluctuating moods and long shots in claustrophobic environments, exploring factory work in real time. It was presented in International Competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2024 where it won the Critics’ Award for cinematographic language.
Very different however is La Scommessa – una notte in corsia, a nocturnal and cynical comedy by Giovanni Dota, produced by IIF with Carlo Buccirosso and Lino Musella in the role of two nurses who bet their Christmas holidays on the head of a patient during the mid-August shift. A contemporary story suspended in a timeless time, an ambiguous atmosphere with a slightly outdated look, with composed and minimal camera movements. The film participates in Venezia 81 – Giornate degli Autori, Notti Veneziane.
Very different projects with constant guidelines: the participatory observation of the environments and the search for their “genius loci”, those privileged observation points that reveal their “imaginary worlds”, to integrate them into the narrative and give it substance; the relationship between the actor’s body, the space and the camera; the search for language together with the director, the identification of the profound meaning of history and its time, around which the photographic idea of the film is built.
