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Enrico Cocozza

Enrico Cocozza

Directing

Biography

Enrico Cocozza was a Scottish-Italian filmmaker whose imaginative and often surreal films earned considerable recognition on the amateur film circuit during the 1940s and 1950s. Working mainly in and around Wishaw, where his family owned the popular Belhaven Café, he produced films including Chick’s Day (1950), a prize-winner at the 1951 Scottish Amateur Film Festival, The Living Ghost (1957) and Glasgow’s Docklands (1959). A combination of personal and health difficulties eventually drew Cocozza away from filmmaking. These included an eye injury, the onset of diabetes, his mother’s declining health and death, and the sale of the family café. He later spent much of his working life teaching at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, but was forced to retire when complications from diabetes caused his eyesight to deteriorate. Despite his earlier success, his films gradually fell into obscurity.

Known For

Surreally Scozzese: Enrico Cocozza 1921 - 1997

A documentary exploring the life and work of experimental Scots-Italian filmmaker Enrico Cocozza through excerpts from his films and interviews with those who knew him. Cocozza gained recognition on the amateur film circuit during the 1940s and 1950s, but his work was largely forgotten in later years. In old age, he became deeply anxious that The Golden Fry—the chip shop beneath his flat, in premises that had once housed his family’s café—might catch fire and destroy the films he kept in storage. This fear ultimately led to his collection being deposited in what is now the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive, allowing his remarkable body of work to be preserved and rediscovered. Created with limited resources but extraordinary visual ambition, Cocozza’s films were, in the best sense, “cheaply extravagant.”

Surreally Scozzese: Enrico Cocozza 1921 - 1997

2001Movie