Akademik

(1950-)

   Screenwriter, theater and film director. One of the most promising of the younger generation of filmmakers who emerged as part of the New Italian Cinema in the 1980s, Salvatores came to the cinema after a long and fruitful experience in theater. Indeed, his first film, Sogno di una notte d'estate (Dream of a Summer's Night, 1983), was a screen adaptation of a rock musical version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream that he had previously directed to great acclaim at Milan's Teatro dell'Elfo. In 1986, however, together with producer Maurizio Totti and actor Diego Abatantuono, he founded the Colorado Film production company, with which he made a number of bittersweet road movies that appeared to be giving voice to the last murmurs of the utopic aspirations of the 1968 generation. Having achieved a huge popularity in Italy with his portrayals of youthful male camaraderie in Marrakech Express (1989) and Turne (Tour, 1990), he then scored his greatest triumph with Mediterraneo (1991), for which he received not only a David di Donatello and a Nastro d'argento at home but also the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

   After a less successful reworking of many of the same elements in Puerto Escondido (1992), he began to experiment with more openly political themes in Sud (South, 1993), with digital imagery and computer games in the futuristic Nirvana (1997), and with split-screen narration in Amnesia (2002). His filmmaking reached a new level of maturity, however, with his luminous adaptation of Niccolo Ammaniti's best-selling novel Io non ho paura (I'm Not Scared, 2003), which was nominated for six David awards as well as for the Golden Bear at Berlin. His Quo vadis, baby (2005) is an impressive experiment in using a mixture of digital, video, and filmic formats to create an effective neo-noir featuring a middle-aged female private detective.

   Historical Dictionary of Italian Cinema by Alberto Mira