Vittorio Taviani

During their student days, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani started shooting documentary films. Their first completed short, "San Miniato, July 1944" (1954), a collaboration with Cesare Zavattini, the cornerstone screenwriter of the Italian neorealist movement, concerned a Nazi massacre in their hometown. Working as a team from the start, the early Taviani films were influenced by and often made with Valentino Orsini, a resistance fighter. A turning point in their work, as well as Italian political cinema in general, was "Subversives" (1967), which combined documentary footage of a prominent Communist leader's funeral and the story of four people for whom this death raises numerous questions about their political future.