“I do everything on my own. I don’t want to have an assistant nearby while I film. Once everything is set up I have to be alone. And the camera becomes like a microscope for me. I discover a world.” —Gianfranco Rosi

Born in Eritrea but growing up between Turkey, Italy, and the United States, Gianfranco Rosi has come to be one of today’s most awarded documentarians. With a career stretching from the early 1990s to the present day, yet with just six features under his belt, Rosi is renowned for his peculiar modus operandi when it comes to new projects: his films originate in lengthy periods of location scouting that often see the filmmaker living in the very areas he’ll eventually explore on camera. It is a journey made up of everyday routines and chance encounters, one that allows for a genuine sense of trust between cameraman and subject matter to gradually unfold. Often serving as his own cinematographer and the only crew member, Rosi is a patient, alert storyteller with a keen instinct to capture reality at its purest. Moving away from easy didacticism or plotted action, his cinema relies on first-person testimony as its driving force.

Our retrospective spotlights an artist whose ultimate goal has been that of overriding any barrier between the viewer and what exists in front of the camera. Whether through the mystical sightseeing of his black-and-white debut Boatman, the inscrutable aura of silence imbued in the absorbing El sicario: Room 164, or a poignant slice of suburban life as sampled in Sacro GRA, Rosi’s mastery lies in the act of waiting for the right moment to, as Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini puts it, embrace “the splendor of truth.”

Sara Marques

Actor

Visual Effects

Screenwriter

Director