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Paolo Taviani 2022 at the Berlinale

Photo:

Ronny Hartmann / AFP

The Italian filmmaker Paolo Taviani ("My Father, My Lord", "Caesar Must Die") has died at the age of 92.

This was confirmed by the prefecture of his home region of Tuscany in the evening.

Taviani, along with his older brother Vittorio, who died in 2018, was one of the most important figures in Italian cinema for decades.

The two of them won several dozen international awards for their films, which they always shot together, including in Cannes and Berlin.

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The Taviani brothers with their Golden Bear for “Caesar Must Die” in Berlin in 2012

Photo: Markus Schreiber / AFP

The brothers made their first feature film together in 1967: “I sovversivi” (“The Subversives”) dealt with the Italian left.

The brothers had their international breakthrough in 1977 with “Padre Padrone” (“My Father, My Lord”).

The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

In 2012, the Tavianis received the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for the film “Caesar Must Die,” a docudrama about rehearsals for a performance of the Shakespeare play “Julius Caesar” in prison.

According to Italian media reports, Paolo Taviani died in a hospital in Rome surrounded by his family after a short, serious illness.

He outlived his brother Vittorio, who lived to the age of 88, by almost six years.

He once said about their relationship: “We have different characters, but the same nature.

Our decisions in life and in art are the same. This became a lifelong collaboration.

Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor of Rome, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: "With Paolo Taviani, a grand master of Italian cinema is leaving us."

Paolo was born in San Miniato, not far from Pisa, in 1931, two years after his brother.

In his mid-20s, he made a documentary about his birthplace in 1954, which showed the deaths of 60 people in the city's cathedral from German shell fire ten years earlier.

The brothers, who were politically strongly influenced by Marxism at the time, took up the topic again decades later in their feature film “The Night of San Lorenzo” (1982), a much-lauded anti-Nazi drama.

After his brother Vittorio's death, Paolo alone wrote and directed "Leonora Addio", inspired by a novella by the Italian Luigi Pirandello.

This means he will be in competition again at the Berlinale in 2022.

He most recently worked on a new film, "Il canto delle meduse" ("The Song of the Medusas"): The project was supposed to tell four stories that are connected to the course of the 2020 corona pandemic.

czl/dpa/AFP