Biography
Born in 1930 in Genoa. Still a young student in 1950 when director Carlo Lizzani gave him a role in the film Achtung Banditi!. Following this experience he traveled to Rome where, after acting in film and theatre, he became the Assistant Director of Lizzani, Gillo Pontecorvo, Sergio Leone, Francesco Rosi. In 1960 he made his debut as a Director with Tiro Al piccione, a film about the Partisan Resistance, on competition at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. In 1964 he directed La Moglie Svedese, an e...
Known For
Complete Filmography

Volonté: The Man of a Thousand Faces
2024
as Self
A documentary exploring the life and legacy of renowned Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté, featuring insights from his colleagues, family, and never-be...

One Hour Only
2023
as Giuliano
Rome, the 1960s. A young couple speed through the city toward the sea in a brand new Fiat 500. Yearning to make love for the first time, they play the...
Siamo in un film di Alberto Sordi?
2023
as Self

Sergio Leone: The Italian Who Invented America
2022
as Self
To mark the recent thirtieth anniversary of Sergio Leone’s death, this documentary sets out to pay tribute to one of the great legends of world cinema...

Ennio
2022
as Self
A portrait of Ennio Morricone, the most popular and prolific film composer of the 20th century, the one most loved by the international public, a two-...

Vera & Giuliano
2020

The Legal Death
2018

Tonino
2017
as Self

Raccontare Venezia
2017
as Self

Cinecittà Babilonia: Sex, Drugs and Black Shirts
2017
as Self - Filmmaker
The story of Italian cinema under Fascism, a sophisticated film industry built around the founding of the Cinecittà studios and the successful birth o...

Everything You Want
2017
as Giorgio
An aimless young troublemaker, Alessandro, squanders his days gambling and getting into fights, and he often spends his nights in jail. With few prosp...

Water and Sugar – Carlo Di Palma: The Colours of Life
2017
as Self
An account of the life and work of legendary cinematographer and director Carlo Di Palma (1925-2004) and an emotional journey through the great moment...

L'abbiamo fatta grossa
2016
as Generale
Yuri Pelagatti is a stage actor who is left jobless after a traumatic separation that resulted in his inability to remember his lines. Arturo Merlino ...
Il segreto di Otello
2015
as Self

The Haunting of Helena
2013
After a divorce, Sophia moves to the south of Italy with her daughter, Helena. Their new home, an apartment within an austere building of the fascist ...

Giuliano Montaldo - Quattro volte vent'anni
2012
as Self

The Years of Lost Images
2012
as Self
A documentary about director Valerio Zurlini. The "lost images" of the title are the movies Zurlini was never able to shoot: between 1962, the year he...

Giovanna Cau - Diversamente giovane
2011
as Self
Noi c'eravamo
2011
as Self

Voi siete qui
2011
as Self

The Entrepreneur
2011
Director, Screenplay, Story
Flaiano: il meglio è passato
2010
as Himself

L'oro di Cuba
2009
Director, Story, Screenplay
The Cuban Revolution turns fifty years old. Fifty years of history, myths and challenges of a country that has influenced politics and culture around ...

Franco Cristaldi e il suo cinema Paradiso
2009

The Demons of St. Petersburg
2008
Director, Screenplay
St. Petersburg, 1860. After a member of the imperial family is assassinated, Fyodor Dostoevsky meets one of the conspirators, who reveals that his com...

Gillo of Ladies and Knights, of Loves and Arms
2007
as Self
Pontecorvo is one of those Italian filmmakers marked for life by neorealism. He declares that he decided to do cinema after leaving a screening of "Pa...

The Caiman
2006
as Franco Caspio
Bruno Bonomo was a famous producer of B-movies in the ‘70s. After a long hiatus, Bonomo offers a screenplay to RAI centered on the figure of Italy’s p...

Sergio Leone: The Way I See Things
2006
as Self
Documentary about Sergio Leone

Adolfo Celi, a Man for Two Worlds
2006
as Self
italian documentary

Filmmakers vs. Tycoons
2005
as Self
How the cinema industry does not respect the author's work as it was conceived, how manipulates the motion pictures in order to make them easier to wa...

Investigation of a Citizen Named Volonté
2004
as Self - Interviewee
Documentary on actor Gian Maria Volonté
Western all'italiana
2004
"Western all'italiana" is a documentary produced and broadcast by the satellite broadcaster Studio Universal in 2004, on the occasion of the broadcast...
Years of the Eagle
1997
Director
The story of Istituto Luce and it's newsreels, full of visual records of the social and political history of Italy under Mussolini's leadership.

Celluloide
1996
as Civalleri (uncredited)
June 1944. In the newly liberated Rome, Roberto Rossellini and Sergio Amidei decide, against all odds, to make an unprecedented, true-to-life film on ...
Rome, November 12, 1994
1995
Director
Francesco Maselli pitched this documentary to the CGIL, CISL, and UIL trade unions as part of the 1.5 million-strong protest march on November 12, 199...

Un eroe borghese
1995
as governatore Banca d'Italia
An intriguing look at a sinister web of power,linking politics and the mafia in modern day Italy.

The Long Silence
1993
as Procuratore Capo
Carla Aldrovandi, a gynecologist, and her husband Marco Canova, a magistrate live on the front line of criminal and political powers in Italy. She is ...

Time to Kill
1989
Director, Screenplay
During the invasion of Ethiopia in 1936, a wounded Italian soldier ends up stranded in the desert after a truck wreck. He makes his way to the nearest...

The Gold Rimmed Glasses
1987
Director, Screenplay
A Jewish couple and a homosexual doctor fall to prejudice and scandal in 1938 Italy.

Control
1987
Director, Screenplay
An experiment of psychological effects under stressful conditions in a shelter. When fifteen strangers are put into a nuclear shelter to see how long ...

Farewell to Enrico Berlinguer
1984
Director
A film of Enrico Berlinguer's funeral in Rome, briefly tracing his career as leader of the Italian Communist Party.

Sabatoventiquattromarzo
1984
Director

Turandot
1983
Director
From the world famous Arena of Verona, an international cast perform one of Puccini's best loved operas. The cruel Princess Turandot, ruler of China, ...

A Dangerous Toy
1979
Director, Screenplay
A meek accountant buys himself a gun and finds out he's a natural marksman. After the friend who introduced him to shooting is killed by gangsters, he...

Closed Circuit
1978
Director, Screenplay
At the local cinema, an audience watches a Spaghetti Western matinee. During the film's on-screen climactic duel, a bullet is fired into a patron. Wit...

And Agnes Chose to Die
1976
Director, Screenplay, Dialogue
After the Nazis take her husband away, an illiterate old washerwoman joins the Resistance as a bike courier in the Central Italian countryside.

A Genius, Two Friends, and an Idiot
1975
Second Unit Director
Expert conman Joe Thanks teams up with half-breed Bill and naive Lucy to steal $300,000 from the Indian-hating Major Cabot. Their elaborate plan is fu...

Giordano Bruno
1973
Director, Screenplay
Fleeing from his enemies in the Catholic Church, the free thinking philosopher, poet and scientist Giordano Bruno has found some protection in Venice....

Sacco & Vanzetti
1971
Director, Story, Screenplay
Boston, 1920. Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are charged and unfairly tried for murder on the basis of their anarchist politi...

The 5th Day of Peace
1970
Director, Screenplay
Based on a true story. Near the end of World War II, two German deserters are put in an Allied POW camp. When a rigid and militaristic German colonel ...

Machine Gun McCain
1969
Director, Writer
After serving 12 years behind bars for armed robbery, tough guy Hank McCain finds himself the pawn of a ruthless mob runt's rebellion against a high l...

Grand Slam
1967
Director
Professor James Anders is a seemingly mild-mannered teacher, an American working in Rio De Janeiro. Anders, bored with years of teaching, decides to p...

The Battle of Algiers
1966
Second Unit
Tracing the struggle of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale to gain freedom from French colonial rule as seen through the eyes of Ali from his ...

The Reckless
1965
Screenplay, Director
In the figure of Ettore Zambrini, a small industrialist with a dream of opening a factory overlooking the Autostrada del Sole, Montaldo offers us an e...

Extraconiugale
1964
Screenplay, Director
Three anthological segments about sexcapades and erotic fantasies in middle-class Italy.

Nudi per vivere
1963
Director
A collection of varieties numbers from various night clubs.

Duel of Champions
1961
Screenplay
A Roman nobleman, Horatius leads an imperial legion during the long and bloody war between the Romans and the Albans. A desperate arrangement is agre...

Pigeon Shoot
1961
Director, Screenplay
Young man Marco Laudato, after the '8/9/1943's WW2 armistice, enlists in the Italian Social Republic army, attending the last days of the old regime...

The Assassin
1961
Suave antiques dealer Alfredo Martelli is picked up by the police with no justification. At the precinct, Martelli realizes what the investigation is ...

The Assassin
1961
First Assistant Director
Suave antiques dealer Alfredo Martelli is picked up by the police with no justification. At the precinct, Martelli realizes what the investigation is ...

Kapo
1960
Co-Director
Determined to survive at any price, Edith, a young Jewish woman deported to an extermination camp, manages to survive by accepting the role of kapo, a...

Esterina
1959
First Assistant Director
Esterina, a young war orphan, joins two truck drivers, Gino and Piero, on their trips along Northern Italy. She wants to find her luck in the big city...

The Wide Blue Road
1957
Assistant Director
Squarciò, a fisherman, lives with his family on a small island off the Dalmatian coast of Italy. Like his fellow villagers, Squarciò struggles against...

The Most Wonderful Moment
1957
as Don Grazzini
Pietro is in love with a nurse; they keep their affair secret until she falls pregnant. Worried that marriage will affect his career, she prepares for...

The Doll that Took the Town
1957
A struggling model concocts a story of being raped and beaten by three strangers and soon becomes a media darling. Complications arise when the police...

Abandoned
1955
as Scattered Soldier from Tuscany
A group of rich young intellectuals hiding from the war in rural Italy play at being partisans when some disbanded soldiers and some refugees ask them...

The Girls of San Frediano
1955
as Venturini
Andrea, a young and charming florentine mechanic in the 1950s, romances five beautiful women simultaneously, enjoying life without really committing t...

Giovanna
1955
Production Manager
This short is set in the early 1950s in a small textile factory in central Italy (Prato). Giovanna and her fellow female workers decide to enact a pro...

High School
1954
as Professore di religione
It's the last year of highschool of a group of teenagers, and now they have to face their final exam, and the loves, happy or not, that sprung during ...

Chronicle of Poor Lovers
1954
as Alfredo Campolmi
Florence, Italy, 1925, during the fascist dictatorship. In order to live near his girlfriend Bianca, young Mario moves to a humble street in the old c...

At the Edge of the City
1953
as don Antonio
Based on real events, in Rome a lawyer is not sure whether to accept defending a lower-class worker wrongly accused of the murder of his girlfriend.

La cieca di Sorrento
1953
as Don Pietro Lisandrini
A small girl goes blind when her mother is murdered.

Attention! Bandits!
1951
as Lorenzo
During the winter of 1944, the partisans stationed in the Ligurian Apennines must go to a factory in Genoa, in order to pick up a delivery of weapons....