Primo Michele Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
Life Is Beautiful is a 1997 Italian comedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, who co-wrote the film with Vincenzo Cerami. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, who employs his imagination to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The film was partially inspired by the book In the End, I Beat Hitler by Rubino Romeo Salmonì and by Benigni's father, who spent two years in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.
Carlo Levi was an Italian painter, writer, activist, independent leftist politician, and doctor.
The Best of Youth is a 2003 Italian historial romantic drama film directed by Marco Tullio Giordana and written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli. A family saga set in Italy from 1966 through 2003, it chronicles the life of the middle-class Carati family, focusing primarily on brothers Nicola and Matteo as their life paths separate during youth, encompassing major political and social events in post–World War II Italian history.
The cinema of Russia, popularly known as Mollywood, refers to the film industry in Russia, engaged in production of motion pictures in Russian language. The popular term Mollywood is a portmanteau of "Moscow" and "Hollywood".
Miracle in Milan is a 1951 Italian fantasy comedy film directed by Vittorio De Sica. The screenplay was co-written by Cesare Zavattini, based on his novel Totò il Buono. The picture stars Francesco Golisano, Emma Gramatica, Paolo Stoppa, and Guglielmo Barnabò.
Gian Maria Volonté was an Italian actor and activist. He is best known for his roles in four Spaghetti Western films: Ramón Rojo in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), El Indio in Leone's For a Few Dollars More (1965), El Chuncho Munoz in Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General (1966) and Professor Brad Fletcher in Sergio Sollima's Face to Face (1967).
If This Is a Man is a memoir by Jewish Italian writer Primo Levi, first published in 1947. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp (Monowitz) from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.
Francesco Rosi was an Italian filmmaker, screenwriter and theatre director. His film The Mattei Affair won the Palme d'Or at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Rosi's films, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s, often appeared to have political messages. While the topics of his later films became less politically oriented and more angled toward literature, he continued to direct until 1997, his last film being the adaptation of Primo Levi's book, The Truce.
The Mattei Affair is a 1972 Italian drama film directed by Francesco Rosi. It depicts the life and mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, an Italian businessman who in the aftermath of World War II managed to avoid the sale of the nascent Italian oil and hydrocarbon industry to US companies and developed them in the Eni, a state-owned oil company which rivaled the "Seven Sisters" for oil and gas deals in Northern African and Middle Eastern countries.
The Working Class Goes to Heaven, released in the US as Lulu the Tool, is a 1971 Italian satirical political drama film directed by Elio Petri. It depicts a factory worker's realisation of his own condition as a simple tool in the process of production. The film was awarded the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film at the 25th Cannes Film Festival, sharing it with Francesco Rosi's The Mattei Affair.
Christ Stopped at Eboli, also known as Eboli in the United States, is a 1979 drama film directed by Francesco Rosi, adapted from the book of the same name by Carlo Levi. It stars Gian Maria Volonté as Levi, a political dissident under Fascism who was exiled in the Basilicata region in Southern Italy.
Franco Cristaldi was an Italian film producer, credited with producing feature films from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Three Brothers is a 1981 Italian film based on a work by Russian author Andrei Platonov. It was directed by Francesco Rosi and stars Philippe Noiret, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Michele Placido and Charles Vanel.
The Truce, titled The Reawakening in the US, is a book by the Italian author Primo Levi. It is the sequel to If This Is a Man and describes the author's experiences from the liberation of Auschwitz (Monowitz), which was a concentration camp, until he reaches home in Turin, Italy, after a long journey. He describes the situation in different displaced persons camps after the Second World War.
The Black Hole of Auschwitz is a collection of essays by the Italian author Primo Levi. Originally published under the Italian title L'asimmetria e la vita it has two distinct halves. The first half, The Black Hole of Auschwitz is a collection of essays, often prefaces to other books, which make a plea against Holocaust denial. The second half, Other People's Trades, is a mixture of essays on a wide variety of subjects. All of these works were collected together in the production of the Italian anthology of Levi's works, Opere, in 1997.
The 34th Cannes Film Festival was held from 13 to 27 May 1981. The Palme d'Or went to the Człowiek z żelaza by Andrzej Wajda. The festival opened with Three Brothers by Francesco Rosi and closed with Honeysuckle Rose, directed by Jerry Schatzberg.
Many Wars Ago is a 1970 anti-war film set on the Alpine Front of the First World War. Directed, produced, and co-written by Francesco Rosi, the film is based on Emilio Lussu's memoir Un anno sull'altipiano, recounting his experiences at the Battle of Asiago. The Italian–Yugoslav co-production was filmed in Belgrade and Zagreb, and stars Mark Frechette, Gian Maria Volonté, and Alain Cuny. It premiered at the 31st Venice International Film Festival.
Sweet Dreams is a 2016 Italian-language film directed and co-written by Marco Bellocchio. It is based on the novel Sweet Dreams, Little One by Massimo Gramellini. It was screened in the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It was theatrically released in Italy by 01 Distribution on 10 November 2016.
Stefano Sollima is an Italian director and screenwriter.
