- Born
- Died
- His father was a shipowner. After school, Rosi initially began studying law, which he soon dropped out to work as a broadcast journalist and book illustrator in Naples. From 1944 to 1945 he worked for "Radio Napoli". In the immediate post-war years, Rosi moved to Rome, where he came into contact with the film world. He initially acted as an assistant to several directors and thus played a key role in the development of Italian "Neorealismo". From 1947 to 1948, Rosi assisted Luchino Visconti in the filming of the masterpiece of neorealism "La terra trema". In addition to working on other Visconti films, he also studied with Michelangelo Antonioni. In 1957 Rosi celebrated his directorial debut with "La sfida".
The success led to a long series of films in the following decades, some of which courageously dealt with unpleasant and critical topics in Italian post-war society. Rosi's films such as "Le mani sulla città" (1963), "Cadaveri eccellenti" (1976) and "Cristo si è fermato a Eboli" (1979) are dedicated to the ruthless analysis of events in contemporary Italian history and the present. The director bluntly denounces the grievances resulting from war, crime and corruption as social processes that are tolerated, accepted or even intended by political power. With the film adaptation of the opera "Carmen" (1984) and the novel by Gabriel García Márquez "Cronaca di una morte annunciata" (1987), Rosi approached emotional productions, abandoning his previous materialistic analysis.
However, both films remain connected to the basic theme of Rosi's work, the Italian South, which the director deepened again through the pessimistic study of the global character of the Italian-American mafia in "Dimenticare Palermo" (1989). Rosi received numerous awards for his work. His directorial debut won an award in Venice in 1958. In 1962 he was awarded the Berlin Silver Bear for the film about "Salvatore Giuliano". In 2000 he received the "Grand Prix des Amériques" in Montreal for his life's work.
Francesco Rosi is married to Giancarla Rosi Mandelli and lives in Rome.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Christian_Wolfgang_Barth
- SpouseGiancarla Mandelli(1964 - April 8, 2010) (her death, 1 child)
- ChildrenFrancesca Rosi
- ParentsSebastiano RosiAmelia Carola
- RelativesMassimo Rosi(Sibling)
- Most of his films deal with controversial issues and have political messages.
- Father of actress Carolina Rosi.
- Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 54th Venice International Film Festival in 1997.
- Studied law at the University of Naples.
- After Goffredo Alessandrini withdrew from Anita Garibaldi (1952), he made his debut as director.
- Terrorism is murder, and murder is not political.
- A man's personality is complex of contrasts and contradictions, of reality while at the same time fantasy, of reality and memory, but memory so directed by the thinker that it begins to seem like it might even be a fantasy.
- The themes of my films are always more or less the same: the relationship between man and society, between man and power. And I've tried to reflect a little of Italian life of the past fifty years. I'e tried to shoe, using Italy as the context,all the problems that come from the oppression of people by power, whether it's economic power, military power, political power, or the power of the Mafia.
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