Gabriele Salvatores

Gabriele Salvatores born 30 July 1950 is an Italian Academy Award winning film director and screenwriter Born in Naples Salvatores debuted as a theater director in 1972 founding in Milan the Teatro dellElfo for which he directed several avantgarde pieces until 1989 In that year he directed his third feature film Marrakech Express which was followed in 1990 by Turné Both films shared a group of actorfriends including Diego Abatantuono and Fabrizio Bentivoglio who will be present in many of his later movies Turné was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival In 1991 Salvatores received international praise for Mediterraneo which won an Academy Award as best foreign film It also won three David di Donatello the most important award for Italian cinema and a Nastro dArgento In 1992 he released Puerto Escondido from the eponymous novel by Pino Cacucci in which Abatantuono and Bentivoglio were joined by another standard actor for Salvatores Claudio Bisio The following year he directed Sud featuring Silvio Orlando an attempt to denounce the political and social situation of the Mezzogiorno of Italy seen from the point of view of the unemployed and those at the margins of society The main themes of Salvatores screenplays are escape from a reality that cannot be accepted or understood nostalgia for friends and voyages that never end A new experimental period however started in 1997 with Nirvana a science fiction cyberpunk attempt which received mixed reviews This was followed by the surreal Denti Teeth 2000 and Amnèsia 2002 Both featured Sergio Rubini In 2003 he directed the financially successful Im Not Scared based on the Niccolò Ammaniti novel of the same name In 2005 he directed the noir Quo Vadis Baby His 2008 film As God Commands was entered into the 31st Moscow International Film Festival