Claudio Caligari
Directing
Biography
Italian director and screenwriter. Born in Arona, Piedmont, Caligari began his career as a documentarist, often collaborating with Franco Barbero; his first work was Perché droga (1975).He made his feature film debut in 1983, with the drug-centered drama Toxic Love, which won the De Sica Award at the 40th Venice International Film Festival. Only fifteen years later he directed another work, the neo-noir The Scent of the Night. He completed the editing of his third and last film, Non essere cattivo, a few days before his death for a tumor. (wikipedia)
Known For
A story set in the 90s and in the outskirts of Rome to Ostia. A world where money, luxury cars, night clubs, cocaine and synthetic drugs are easy to run. A world in which Vittorio and Cesare, in their early twenties, act in search of their success.
Don't Be Bad
A former policeman turns full-time robber and goes on a downward spiral of crime in 1970s Rome.
The Scent of the Night
The alienating and repetitive life of a group of heroin junkies in 1980s Rome.
Toxic Love
Divided into three parts (two documentary and one fictional), the film explores the early stages of the 1977 movement, between demonstrations and heated assemblies at the Circoli del Proletariato Giovanile of the State University of Milan. The daily difficulties and the search for redemption are told without rhetoric, but with a raw reflection on social marginalization.
La parte bassa
This documentary intends to contribute to the analysis of the drugs problem, by studying a huge district in a peripheral area of a large city: the Mirafiori South suburb of Turin, a vast ghetto where 15.000 people live in huge 9/10-storey buildings without any social services.
Perché droga
For a long time, psychoanalysis failed to make inroads into Italy. Idealism, Catholicism and fascism each regarded it as a pseudo-science, while Marxism saw it as a bourgeois ideology. It was only after 1968 that the situation gradually began to change: numerous groups were founded who took their bearings from Lacan, such as the Milan collective Semiotica e psicoanalisi, who organized an international conference on the subject of madness in 1976.
La follia della rivoluzione
Shot by Alberto Grifi at the Parco Lambro Juvenile Proletariat Festival between 26 and 29 June 1976. Grifi, together with Franco Berbero and a young Claudio Caligari, filmed 25 hours on video and 3 hours on film which never made it to the final cut of a report for which he had been called by the organizers, the editorial staff of the magazine 'Re Nudo'.