Biennale Cinema
Director
Marco Müller
From 1991 to 2000, he directed the Locarno International Film Festival (in Switzerland), renewing the criteria for the programming from the roots up: alongside the numerous “discoveries” of directors who subsequently became famous, these programmes were marked also by the retrospectives: the group of screenings and debates animated by Jean-Luc Godard around the cinema centennial (and the world premiere of the series of his Histoire(s) du cinéma); the cross-referenced review of 50 years of “American cinema seen by its creators” by Coppola, Scorsese, Eastwood, Allen, Bigelow, Jarmusch, Carpenter, Lynch, Van Sant, Ferrara, Woo and other “greats” of US cinema (who all wrote an original text for a book published in the Actes Sud Cinéma series directed by Thierry Fremaux); the full screening of Joe Dante rounded off by the range of “second-generation” directors from the school of Roger Corman; the first and never repeated true full-length screenings of Marco Bellocchio (with the first exhibition of his sketches and preparatory drawings for the cinema), Abbas Kiarostami (with the first exhibition of his watercolours and photographs) and Youssef Chahine; the discovery of 30 masterpieces of Soviet film-making, made to disappear by the censors and never before “liberated”.
At the same time as his activity as director of the festival on the shores of the Lake Maggiore, between 1992 and 2002 he created and directed the Fondazione Montecinemaverità (which in the light of the new prospects for film-making co-operation, re-processed the assumptions of the Huub Bals Fund).
Between 1998 and 2002, he worked as director of the Film and Video Department of Fabrica (the Benetton group’s research centre on communication), where he tackled the training of new film and video-makers. In this context, it is worth noting his new role as film producer - for Fabrica Cinema, the production facility he created alongside his department. Among his productions are two shorts by Fabrica scholarship holders (Afterwords, Venice 2000, and First Death Experience, Cannes 2002), and nine feature films: three were co-produced - Viaggio verso il sole by Yesim Ustaoglu (Turkey), two prizes in Berlin 1999; Moloch by Aleksander Sokurov (Russia), prize for the screenplay in Cannes 1999; Adanggaman by Roger Gnoan M’Bala (Ivory Coast), Venice 2001, two awards at the Panafrican festival at Ouagadougou 2000 - and six were produced by him for Fabrica Cinema: Seventeen Years by Zhang Yuan (China), prize for directing, Venice 1999; Blackboards by Samira Makhmalbaf (Iran), special jury’s prize at Cannes 2000; La bestia dalle sette teste by Lais Bodansky (Brazil), youth award at Locarno 2000 and 32 prizes in Brazil and in Latin America; No Man’s Land by Danis Tanovic (Bosnia), prize for the screenplay at Cannes 2001, Oscar 2002 for best foreign film; Secret Ballot by Babak Payami (Iran), award for screenplay in Venice 2001; Angel on the Right by Jamshed Usmonov (Tadzikistan), Cannes 2002 (Critics’ award at the London Film Festival, Special Jury Prize at Filmex, Tokyo). After a break of a year (spent consolidating his two new production companies, Downtown Pictures in Italy and Riforma Film in Switzerland), he began once more his activity as director at Fabrica Cinema in January 2004. In the fall 2007, he will produce for Fabrica Campania, a documentary film written by the celebrated writer Mo Yan and directed by Zhang Yuan, alongside with Backstage, the first feature by the well-known theatrical director Pietro Babina.
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