Film career
In 2004, Luisi made his debut as a feature film director with the comedy Verflixt verliebt, which was nominated for the Swiss Film Award in the Best Fiction Film category and won the Feature Film Award by the Filmfestival Max Ophüls in Saarbrücken. [5] [6] Luisi also worked on screenplays without being involved as a director, such as Vitus in 2005 and Länger leben in 2010. Vitus starred Bruno Ganz and premiered at the Berlinale 2006. It won the Swiss Film Award and was shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination in the category Best Foreign Language Film. [7]
Luisi's third directorial work The Fraulein and the Sandman received the Audience Award at the 2011 Filmfestival Max Ophüls [8] and another nomination for the Swiss Film Award for Best Fiction Film. In 2014, Luisi's comedy-drama Unlikely Heroes about asylum seekers rehearsing a performance of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell was released and was honoured with the Audience Award at the Locarno Film Festival. [9] In 2017, his comedy Flitzer was released with the comedian and actor Beat Schlatter as co-screenwriter and leading actor. In 2021, Luisi made his second drama film Prinzessin, [10] [11] following Boys Are Us in 2012. Another collaboration with Schlatter took place in 2023 with the satirical film Bon Schuur Ticino, which is about a scenario in which multilingual Switzerland is determined to have only one national language. [12] [13] With almost 340,000 tickets sold by then, Bon Schuur Ticino became one of the ten most successful Swiss films of all time in March 2024. [14]
In 2024, Luisi's film The Last Screenwriter was released, which received attention due to its production story. The film script, about a screenwriter who realizes that artificial intelligence can write better than he can, was written entirely by ChatGPT under Luisi's direction. [15] [16] Luisi said that he wanted to contribute to the ongoing debate about the use of AI in the film industry and announced before completion that he would release the film online free of charge for this reason. [17] The film was seen as controversial, a London art house cinema cancelled the premiere screening after criticism on the internet. [18] [19] In the same year, La Storia del Frank e della Nina by Paola Randi, which Luisi co-produced with Fandango Media in Italy, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the festival's Magic Lantern Award. [20] [21]
