Franco
Piavoli

Since his birth in 1933 in Pozzolengo, he has remained deeply connected to the territory of the province of Brescia and its cultural traditions. A law graduate from the University of Pavia, he taught law while simultaneously cultivating the art of painting and photography. In the 1960s, he began making experimental films, and his shorts Le stagioni (1961), Domenica sera (1962), Emigranti (1963), and Evasi (1964) won awards at the Montecatini Film Festival. In 1982, thanks to the support of his friend Silvano Agosti, he made Il pianeta azzurro, his first feature film, which achieved immediate success: unanimously defined as a "pantheistic poem" and a "visual, sound, bucolic, epic poem," it won the BCV Award for new authors at the 50th Venice International Film Festival, the UNESCO Award, and a Nastro d'Argento. In the years immediately following, Piavoli also devoted himself to opera, directing Suor Angelica for the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and Bellini's La forza del destino and La Norma at the Teatro Grande in Brescia. In 1989, he continued his personal and intimate cinematic research, balancing documentary and poetry, directing the film Nostos, il ritorno, a reimagining of the myth of Ulysses, which was presented at the Locarno Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival in San Francisco, and the Moscow Film Festival. In 1996, he completed this ideal trilogy with the feature film Voci nel tempo, which won the FEDIC Award at the Venice Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Filmtage in Göttingen in 1998. This was followed in 2002 by Al primo soffio di vento, presented in competition at the Locarno Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, which won the Audience Award at the 16th Neue Heitmatfilm in Freistadt and the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Santa Cruz Film Festival in 2004. At this point in his prolific career, he was awarded the prestigious Vittorio De Sica Prize at the Quirinale. In 2005, Piavoli participated in the Festivaletteratura with Affettuosa presenza, a portrait of his friend, the Mantuan poet Umberto Bellintani, through his intense epistolary relationship with Alessandro Parronchi. In 2009, the director took part in Ermanno Olmi's documentary Terra Madre with the episode L'orto di Flora. The following year, he was awarded the medal of the President of the Italian Republic as part of the Solinas Prize. In 2016, the Festival Cinema du Réel in Paris dedicated a complete retrospective to him at the Beaubourg, while his latest medium-length film, Festa, was presented at the Locarno Film Festival. Despite the international recognition garnered by his highly personal, timeless cinema, Franco Piavoli has never distanced himself from the provincial setting where he has always lived and which has strongly informed his entire oeuvre.