Matteo Garrone

The son of the Roman theatre critic Nico Garrone and of the photographer Donatella Rimoldi — herself the daughter of the 1940s actor from La Spezia, Adriano Rimoldi — he devoted himself to cinema from a young age: after graduating from the Ripetta art lyceum in 1986 he worked as an assistant cameraman, before turning full-time to painting. In 1996 he won the Sacher d'Oro with the short film Silhouette, which the following year would become one of the three episodes of his first feature film Terra di mezzo, a collage of three stories of immigration in Rome in which the boundaries between fiction and documentary tend to blur. That same year, together with Carlo Cresto-Dina, he shot a documentary in New York about Pentecostalism entitled Bienvenido espirito santo.