Among the unsolved mysteries of the history of Italian cinema there is undoubtedly the incomprehensible and scandalous ostracism suffered over the years by Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, promoters of the sharpest and most iconoclastic partnership ever to grow in the shadow of the Italian film and television industry. Strengthened by a creative vein of disconcerting vividness, the two directors from Palermo have interrogated the devastating squalor of our society like no other, creating highly original poetics that mixes Pasolini with Buñuel, Beckett with Buster Keaton. After the end of the collaboration with Maresco, Daniele Ciprì continued his expressive path with his usual rigour, first dressing some of the most important Italian films of recent years with highly refined photography (Vincere by Bellocchio, La pecora nera by Celestini), and now returning behind the camera to direct two acting monsters (Toni Servillo and the Chilean Alfredo Castro) in a tragicomic story with a setting, needless to say, Sicilian. While waiting for the film to be ready for the festival circuits and for theatrical distribution, an opportunity not to be missed to dialogue with one of the few true "artists" of Italian cinema.
“The problem is not to betray yourself, the difficulty is not to deny yourself, not to seek easy consensus, continuing to work as you have always done. Rejecting television appearances, talk shows that invite you, declining job offers for advertisements and video clips. What has established itself in recent years is a para-television, pseudo-sociological cinema, stories of thirty- and forty-year-olds in crisis, of couple failures, a cinema that only serves newspapers and talk shows to fuel polls. But in all this there is no real cinema. At most we can talk about television fiction." (Daniele Ciprì)
Daniele Ciprì: Born in Palermo in August 1962. Together with Franco Maresco, he created the Cinico TV series between the 80s and 90s, broadcast on the third Rai network. They are short, cutting films that explode the image of a deformed and weakened humanity, groping in a landscape of crumbling wrecks, desolate areas, dazzling skies, silences and solitude. What emerges is a picture of raw compassion that extends far beyond the Palermo suburbs where the filming takes place and which becomes a metaphor for an anthropological drift hidden behind the scenes of contemporary society. Using the same grotesque-surreal style, tinged with references to the historical avant-garde, Ciprì created, again together with Maresco, but paying particular attention to photography, the feature films Lo zio di Brooklyn (1995), Totò che visse due volte (1998), Il ritorno di Cagliostro (2003) and Come inguaiammo il cinema italiano (2004). As director of photography he also works on the films of Roberta Torre (Tano da morire, Sud Side Story, Mare nero), Marco Bellocchio (Vincere) and Ascanio Celestini (La pecora nera). He recently finished filming his next feature film, È stato il figlio.