Pietro Marcello

Caserta, 1976

Pietro Marcello is a film director, screenwriter and producer. Before gaining international recognition at the 2007 Venice Film Festival with his first feature, Il passaggio della linea, Pietro Marcello made his directing debut with a series of short films set in Naples and made between 2003 and 2005. From this period come Il cantiere, a documentary about the Ventaglieri park, and La baracca, the story of a homeless man. These were followed by the intimate, utopian La bocca del lupo (2009), winner at the 27th Torino Film Festival and of the Teddy Award at the Berlin Film Festival, the David di Donatello and the Nastro d’Argento for best documentary. Il silenzio di Pelešjan (2011) is devoted to the legendary Armenian film-maker Artavazd Pelešjan, a fellow student of Andrei Tarkovsky at the Moscow film school. Presented in competition at the Locarno Festival in 2016, Bella e perduta is a work of civic commitment suspended between fairy tale and myth. Freely adapted from Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden (2019) is the timeless portrait of a young man torn between his humble origins, bourgeois life and social struggle. The film won the Platform Prize for best film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019 and the David di Donatello for Best Adapted Screenplay, and earned Luca Marinelli the award for best actor at the Venice Film Festival. With Futura, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in 2021 and selected for more than twenty-five international festivals, Pietro Marcello, together with Francesco Munzi and Alice Rohrwacher, investigates how young people between 15 and 20 in Italy imagine the future.