Fabio del Greco
- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Fabio Del Greco was born in Pescara, an Abruzzo city on the Adriatic Sea. Already in elementary school he wrote short stories. The first movie he sees in the cinema is Flash Gordon, and the experience in the theater affects him deeply. At the age of 10 he discovers Steven Spielberg's cinema.
At the age of 12 he realizes that what is most suitable for him is storytelling in images: his great passion becomes making films. During middle school he made several feature films with friends, never completed definitively. These are rudimentary fantasy adventure feature film experiments, shot with an old cathode ray tube camera with portable video recorder, which allow Del Greco to understand the mechanisms of filmmaking.
Then, in the late 1980s, he was given a modern VHS camcorder that allowed him to devote himself more seriously to filmmaking. These sketches of never completed feature films turn out to be an extraordinary school of cinema. He will use fragments of those scenes more than 30 years later in the film Employee's mystery. In this period the reference films are those of Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, together with many other authors of American cinema.
In 1996, with material shot years before, he made his first short film Summer Days. It is a story built in flashbacks that leads the protagonist, Fabio Del Greco himself, to remember all the misadventures he experienced with a friend with whom he has lost contact, and of which he learns about the recent murder by listening to the radio. The short film tells the loss of innocence and the painful passage from adolescence to adulthood. It is an awareness of how in life, despite the many encounters we have, we are destined to travel lonely and individual paths.
In 1997 he made City Lights, a film of about 30 minutes in black and white about the alienation of a young bourgeois during the cold Christmas period, between wandering, drug dealers, drugs, thefts and strange childhood vision, while among the lights of the city the consumerist ritual of the end of year celebrations is consummated.
The two films were edited with analog magnetic tape technology, using an editing unit that connected two VHS VCRs. Both short films were selected by Enrico Ghezzi at the 1997 edition of the Bellaria Festival.
In 1998 he moved to Rome and studied at the Maldoror film school in Piazza Vittorio, directed by the Algerian director Kadur Naimi. He also studies at the Dams University of Roma Tre. In the meantime, he begins to frequent industrial film sets as an extra, assistant director and actor in supporting roles. This becomes a second important film school through which he learns the production mechanisms and the work on the big sets, such as that of the film The Gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese, where he meets the poet and playwright Massimiliano Perrotta with whom he will collaborate in many films for the film script.
The film school and the university did not satisfy him from a creative point of view and he proceeded to make new films involving the friends of Dams di Roma Tre. He shoots several short films with actor Karim Galici, but the most interesting result of the Roman university period is The Moon in Aries, a medium-length film from 2000, where he himself plays the protagonist.
The Moon in Aries is the story of a young aspiring poet who arrives in Rome after leaving his provincial city. He meets corrupt publishers who steal his manuscript, meets a girl he falls in love with but who abandons him and betrays him.
The film, lasting about 50 minutes, is interpreted by Fabio del Greco himself with a style that oscillates between grotesque irony and existential drama. It is a reflection on art and its manipulation, shot in a very personal style. The actors Karim Galici, Valerio Mollica and the writer Claudio Lorusso collaborate on the film.
After writing 3 screenplays and trying to make them within the Italian film industry, between the offices of producers/bureaucrats linked to public funds, Del Greco realizes that every film project depends on state and European public funding, and that that is not a sustainable way to develop a prolific and coherent artistic discourse.
Development times become very long and the possibilities of realizing a project are linked to situations and mechanisms that have little to do with creativity and art. He knows many operators in the sector and realizes that cinema does not give opportunities for expression like literature and the other arts: even arthouse cinema turns out to be a passive industry, a corpse kept alive by state funding and monopolized by a bizarre cultural caste.
Entertainment cinema, on the other hand, still exists, but it is linked to fashions, to the editorial policies of televisions, to television comedians or to the terrible Christmas films. After a period of disappointing inactivity and creative impoverishment, convinced that cinema is an art that can be practiced outside the cumbersome mechanisms of the mainstream circuit, he decides to devote himself full time to the making of independent films, producing his own films. project, without depending on the official bureaucratic mechanisms of film production, which revolve exclusively around money and the issues that interest those who manage them.
At the age of 12 he realizes that what is most suitable for him is storytelling in images: his great passion becomes making films. During middle school he made several feature films with friends, never completed definitively. These are rudimentary fantasy adventure feature film experiments, shot with an old cathode ray tube camera with portable video recorder, which allow Del Greco to understand the mechanisms of filmmaking.
Then, in the late 1980s, he was given a modern VHS camcorder that allowed him to devote himself more seriously to filmmaking. These sketches of never completed feature films turn out to be an extraordinary school of cinema. He will use fragments of those scenes more than 30 years later in the film Employee's mystery. In this period the reference films are those of Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, together with many other authors of American cinema.
In 1996, with material shot years before, he made his first short film Summer Days. It is a story built in flashbacks that leads the protagonist, Fabio Del Greco himself, to remember all the misadventures he experienced with a friend with whom he has lost contact, and of which he learns about the recent murder by listening to the radio. The short film tells the loss of innocence and the painful passage from adolescence to adulthood. It is an awareness of how in life, despite the many encounters we have, we are destined to travel lonely and individual paths.
In 1997 he made City Lights, a film of about 30 minutes in black and white about the alienation of a young bourgeois during the cold Christmas period, between wandering, drug dealers, drugs, thefts and strange childhood vision, while among the lights of the city the consumerist ritual of the end of year celebrations is consummated.
The two films were edited with analog magnetic tape technology, using an editing unit that connected two VHS VCRs. Both short films were selected by Enrico Ghezzi at the 1997 edition of the Bellaria Festival.
In 1998 he moved to Rome and studied at the Maldoror film school in Piazza Vittorio, directed by the Algerian director Kadur Naimi. He also studies at the Dams University of Roma Tre. In the meantime, he begins to frequent industrial film sets as an extra, assistant director and actor in supporting roles. This becomes a second important film school through which he learns the production mechanisms and the work on the big sets, such as that of the film The Gangs of New York by Martin Scorsese, where he meets the poet and playwright Massimiliano Perrotta with whom he will collaborate in many films for the film script.
The film school and the university did not satisfy him from a creative point of view and he proceeded to make new films involving the friends of Dams di Roma Tre. He shoots several short films with actor Karim Galici, but the most interesting result of the Roman university period is The Moon in Aries, a medium-length film from 2000, where he himself plays the protagonist.
The Moon in Aries is the story of a young aspiring poet who arrives in Rome after leaving his provincial city. He meets corrupt publishers who steal his manuscript, meets a girl he falls in love with but who abandons him and betrays him.
The film, lasting about 50 minutes, is interpreted by Fabio del Greco himself with a style that oscillates between grotesque irony and existential drama. It is a reflection on art and its manipulation, shot in a very personal style. The actors Karim Galici, Valerio Mollica and the writer Claudio Lorusso collaborate on the film.
After writing 3 screenplays and trying to make them within the Italian film industry, between the offices of producers/bureaucrats linked to public funds, Del Greco realizes that every film project depends on state and European public funding, and that that is not a sustainable way to develop a prolific and coherent artistic discourse.
Development times become very long and the possibilities of realizing a project are linked to situations and mechanisms that have little to do with creativity and art. He knows many operators in the sector and realizes that cinema does not give opportunities for expression like literature and the other arts: even arthouse cinema turns out to be a passive industry, a corpse kept alive by state funding and monopolized by a bizarre cultural caste.
Entertainment cinema, on the other hand, still exists, but it is linked to fashions, to the editorial policies of televisions, to television comedians or to the terrible Christmas films. After a period of disappointing inactivity and creative impoverishment, convinced that cinema is an art that can be practiced outside the cumbersome mechanisms of the mainstream circuit, he decides to devote himself full time to the making of independent films, producing his own films. project, without depending on the official bureaucratic mechanisms of film production, which revolve exclusively around money and the issues that interest those who manage them.
