Giordana, Marco Tullio

(1950-)

   Director and screenwriter. After an intense involvement with left-wing politics during his student years, Giordana worked with Roberto Faenza on the feature-length political documentary Forza Italia (1978). Three years later he wrote and directed his first fictional feature, Maledetti vi amerb (To Love the Damned, 1980), a bitter reflection on the failure of the 1968 movement to achieve its Utopian goals. This was followed by La caduta degli angeli ribelli (The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1981), which recounted an ill-fated liaison between a middle-class wife and mother and a terrorist on the run, and Notti e nebbie (Nights and Fog, 1984), a two-part television adaptation of a wartime novel by Carlo Castellaneta. In the wake of the tragedy at the Heysel soccer stadium in Brussels in 1985, Giordana made Appuntamento a Liverpool (Rendezvous at Liverpool, 1988), a thriller in which a young woman attempts to track down the person responsible for her father's death. After a period spent directing opera and lyric theater in the early 1990s and also publishing a novel, Vita segreta del signore delle macchine (Secret Life of the Lord of Machines, 1990), Giordana returned to the big screen in 1995 with Pasolini, un delitto italiano (Pasolini, an Italian Crime), a fictional investigation of the many still-unexplained circumstances surrounding the brutal murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

   This was followed by the similarly socially committed I cento passi (The Hundred Steps, 2000), which recounted the life and death of Peppino Impastato, a passionate young left-wing organizer blown up by the Mafia in Sicily in 1978. The film was widely praised and received a host of prizes, including the Scholars Jury David di Donatello and the Venice Festival Pasinetti Award. Giordana's greatest triumph, however, came with La meglio gioventu (The Best of Youth, 2003) a moving six-hour family saga set within the context of 40 years of recent Italian history. Originally made for RAI television, the film was shown in two parts at Cannes, where it won the Un certain regard section and thereafter achieved spectacular international box office success. Giordana's most recent work, Quando sei nato non puoi piu nasconderti (Once You're Born You Can No Longer Hide, 2005), a film highlighting the plight of illegal immigrants to Italy, seen from the viewpoint of a young Italian boy, has also been strongly acclaimed, confirming Giordana's standing as one of the most socially conscious of contemporary Italian filmmakers.