Valeria Golino (Naples, Italy, 1966), the favorite actress of many of the most important Italian directors over the past twenty years, as well as a European actress in great demand in the United States, with her long list of roles, she has become established as one of the most versatile talents in Italian cinema. She was born into a cosmopolitan atmosphere, which influenced her artistic career from the very beginning. She spent her adolescence between Naples and Greece (her father is Italian and her mother a Greek painter) and began to work as a model in Greece. At the age of 16 she moved to Rome, where she met director Lina Wertmüller who noticed her and signed her up for the film Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l’angolo come un brigante di strada (1983) in the role of Ugo Tognazzi’s daughter. At the age of 19 she won her first leading role in Piccoli Fuochi (1985) by Peter Del Monte. The following year, at just twenty, she was recognized in Venice where she won the Coppa Volpi as Best Actress for the film Storia d’amore by Citto Maselli, a prize that brought her recognition abroad.
Valeria Golino appeared in several international productions, such as Last summer in Tangiers by Alexander Arcady (1987), Paura e Amore by Margarethe Von Trotta (1987), and Gli occhiali d’oro by Giuliano Montaldo (1987), before moving to America at the age of twenty-two where she had a part in Big Top Pee-wee (1988) by Randal Kleiser. At the same time she was selected to work with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man (1988) by Barry Levinson. In 1990 she returned to Italy for another film by Peter Del Monte, Tracce di vita amorosa, in competition at the 47.Venice Film Festival, and two years later she went to Mexico to film Puerto Escondido by Gabriele Salvatores. On Come due coccodrilli (1995) by Giacomo Campiotti she acted opposite Fabrizio Bentivoglio, returning to Venice the following year in Escoriandoli by Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella. Her cosmopolitan education drew continuing recognition abroad, where she had the opportunity to work with Jerzy Skolimowski in Torrents of Spring (1989), with Sean Penn in The Indian Runner (1991), with Jim Abrahams in Hot Shots! (1991) and Hot Shots! 2 (1993), with Gary Oldman in Immortal Beloved (1993), with Mike Figgis and Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), with John Carpenter in Escape from L.A. (1996), and with Quentin Tarantino in Four Rooms (1996). In the meantime she made her debut as a producer (La strage del gallo, 1994, by Andrea Pantzis, which was never distributed in Italy).
In 1997 Silvio Soldini chose her as the star of the film Le acrobate (Grolla d’Oro Award for Best Actress). In 1998 she returned to the Venice Film Festival in two films: L’albero delle pere by Francesca Archibugi, in competition, and Side Street by Tony Gerber in the Prospettive section. The following year she returned to Venice in a double role, as the actress in the debut short film by Fabrizio Bentivoglio Tìpota, presented in the special Programs of the 56.Venice Film Festival, and as the emcee for the awards ceremony in which she presented the Grand Prize of the Jury to Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami for The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). In 1999 Valeria worked with Peter Del Monte again in Controvento and was chosen by Ferzan Ozpetek for Harem Suare. Her attraction to American film continued, however, and in 2000 she was chosen by Rodrigo Garcia to enrich the stellar cast of Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her (2000). In recent years she has participated in a growing number of projects: the bio-pic Frida by Julie Taymar (2002); the intense Respiro by Emanuele Crialese (2002), which won her a second Nastro d’Argento as Best Actress after the one she was awarded for Storia d’amore; the French film noir, 36 Quai des Orfèvres, by Olivier Marchal (2004); La Guerra di Mario (2005) by Antonio Capuano, which won her the David di Donatello as Best Actress; Texas by Fausto Paravidino (2005) presented in the Orizzonti section of the 62.Venice Film Festival; A casa nostra by Francesca Comencini (2006); Il Sole Nero by Krzysztof Zanussi (2007); La ragazza del lago by Andrea Molaioli (2007); Lascia perdere, Johnny by Fabrizio Bentivoglio (2007), and Caos Calmo by Antonello Grimaldi (2008).
Douglas Gordon (Glasgow, Scotland, 1966), acknowledged as one of the most important “visual artists” of his generation, has focused since the beginning of his career on two expressive forms: verbal communication and moving images. Awarded the prestigious Turner Prize (1996) at the age of thirty, during his career he has created video-installations, films, photographs, objects and texts using a variety of languages to explore issues related to the search for identity, the tension between good and evil, and always showing extreme interest in a profound study of the human condition. Gordon is known to the public for his video installations, in which he studies the viewer’s perceptive processes by using recognizable images to explore questions about memory and individual identity and their evolution over time. For this purpose he often uses sequences from classic Hollywood films, such as Rear Window (1954) or Taxi Driver (1976). An example of his ability to elaborate on cinema is the famous 24 Hours Psycho (1993), one of his most famous works internationally. Presented in 1993 at the Tramway Theatre in Glasgow, 24 Hours Psycho is based on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) projected without the audio and at a speed of 2 frames per second (instead of the usual 24), slowing the film down enough to make it last 24 hours.
After training at the Glasgow School of Art between 1984 and 1988, Gordon completed his studies at the Slade School of Art in London. Between the Eighties and Nineties, the work of this young Scottish artist attracted great interest on the artistic scene in Glasgow: in 1986 his first solo show drew the attention of critics and led him to exhibit his works in important museums such as the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centro Cultural de Belém in Portugal and the DIA Center for the Arts in New York. Other prestigious institutions hosted his works in ensuing years, including the Tate in Liverpool (2000), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2001), the Hayward Gallery in London (2002) and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (2003).
In 1997 he participated in SkulpturProjekte in Münster with an installation inside a pedestrian underpass transformed into a sort of movie theatre that projected two famous movies representing religious and satanic obsession in a loop on both sides of a single screen: The Song of Bernadette (1943) by Henry King and The Exorcist (1973) by William Friedkin. In 2001 Gordon had his first retrospective in the United States at the Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles and later exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada, at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. In 2005, he curated ‘The Vanity of Allegory’, an exhibition at the Guggenheim in Berlin. In recent years Gordon’s works have been exhibited in many other prestigious art institutions such as the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Edinburgh, and the MArt in Trento. In addition to the Turner Prize, Gordon has won many other international awards such as the “Premio Duemila” for the best young artist at the Visual Arts Biennale in Venice in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Award at the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo. His most recent exhibitions include ‘Timeline’ (2006) at the MoMA in New York, ‘Superhumanatural’ (2007) at the National Gallery of Scotland and ‘Between Darkness and Light’ (2007) at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Wolfsburg. Gordon’s real debut in the world of cinema, however, came in 2005 with the film Zidane - A 21st Century Portrait (Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle), directed in partnership with Philippe Parréno and presented out of competition at Cannes in 2006 and pitched between documentary and video-art.
