A documentary on the great
Italian cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, 'Water and Sugar, Carlo
di Palma, the Colors of Life' by Kurdish Iranian director
Fariborz Kamkary, has debuted at the 73rd edition of the Venice
Film Festival.
The documentary, which was presented on Tuesday in the
Venezia Classici section, pays homage to the filmmaker,
documentarist and director of photography of over 100 films,
including movies by Roberto Rossellini, Bernardo Bertolucci,
Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen.
The extraordinary work of Di Palma (1925-2004) is chronicled
in the documentary through interviews and photos gathered over
the course of 10 years by producer Adriana Chiesa, who was Di
Palma's partner for the last 30 years of his life.
A number of leading filmmakers who have worked with him,
including Nikita Mikhalkov, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, Mira Nair
and Volker Schlondorff, pay tribute to the iconic director of
photography in the documentary.
"He made films on which my education is based", Wenders said
in one of the interviews.
Di Palma was born in 1925 in Rome.
His mother was a flower vendor who "made me live surrounded
by colors since I was little", he used to say.
At 15, he was already on set as a camera operator for
Luchino Visconi in Obsession (1943).
He worked his way up during Neorealism, the golden age of
Italian cinema focusing post-war Italian society, until he
became director of photography.
He worked with movie icons such as Michelangelo Antonioni
for whom he redefined the use of color in movies like Red Desert
(1964) and Blow-Up (1966).
Bertolucci, who worked with di Palma in Tragedy of a
Ridiculous Man (1981), describes him in the documentary as a
"man of infinite elegance".
He is also portrayed as "smart, very funny and very easy to
work with" by Woody Allen, who chose him as the director of
photography for 12 of his movies, including Hannah and Her
Sisters (1986) and Deconstructing Harry (1997).
"In the many years together, there was never anything he
wasn't able to do on set", Allen also said.
Adriana Chiesa started working on the interviews for the
documentary in 2006, filming movie greats who have recently died
including Ettore Scola, Francesco Rosi and Carlo Lizzani.
She involved Iranian-born Kurdish screenwriter and director
Fariborz Kamkari in 2011 in order to have a more detached
approach to the material.
"I was too involved", she said, presenting the documentary.
Kamkari, whose previous work includes The Flowers of Kirkuk
(2010), The Forbidden Chapter (2005) and the documentary Black
Tape (2002), said di Palma's rigor and uncompromising approach
to filmmaking sets the example for the new generations.
The documentary "is a letter of love and thanks to Di
Palma", he concluded.
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