About

Bernardobertolucci.org is a website dedicated to the work and life of Bernardo Bertolucci. Conceived as a work in progress, the website will follow the process of archiving videos, photographs and paper documents belonging to Bernardo Bertolucci, his brother Giuseppe and their father Attilio begun by the Cineteca di Bologna, and will make them partially accessible online.

Fabien S. Gerard (1956) teaches Film History at the University of Brussels (ULB). He came to Rome in the early ’80s and befriended the poet Attilio Bertolucci and his two sons before becoming Bernardo’s assistant director from The Last Emperor onwards. He co-wrote with the director and Giovanni Mastrangelo the original story for Little Buddha. His books include: Pasolini ou le mythe de la barbarie (1981), Ombres jaunes. Journal de tournage du ‘Dernier Empereur’ (1987), Sognando ‘The Dreamers’ (2003) and Bernardo Bertolucci: la certezza e il dubbio (2010). He is also the author of a PhD dissertation about the filmmaker (2002), currently being reworked.

Tiziana Lo Porto was born in Bolzano in 1972 and has lived in Algiers and Palermo. She currently lives in Rome, where she translates and writes for D La Repubblica delle donne, Il venerdì and Linus. She has edited and translated books by Charles Bukowski, Tom Wolfe, Jim Carroll, James Franco, Francesca Marciano, Kim Gordon, Patti Smith and Vasco Brondi. She and Daniele Marotta are co-authors of the graphic novel Superzelda: The Graphic Life of Zelda Fitzgerald (2011), published in Italy, France, Spain, the US and South America. In 2016 she edited a book of interviews with the director Bernardo Bertolucci. Cinema la prima volta.

Photojournalist in Africa in the ’70s, Giovanni Mastrangelo returned to Italy in the early ’90s and began working as a writer and screenwriter for film and television. His first project with Bernardo Bertolucci dates back to 1992 writing the synopsis for Little Buddha. Today he lives and works around Rome. He is the author of the short story collections Bratto (1992) and Il coupé scarlatto (1994), the story in the form of a fable Il piccolo Buddha (1995) and the novels African Soap (2001), Henry (2006; which was adapted into a film with the same name by Alessandro Piva) and Il sistema di Gordon (2016). La Nave di Teseo will publish his I padri e i vinti in early 2020.

Director, screenwriter and producer, Clare Peploe  (1941-2021) was born in Tanzania and grew up in England and Italy. She debuted in 1981 with the short Couples & Robbers, nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA Film Award. She followed up with three feature-length films High Season (1987), Rough Magic (1995) and The Triumph of Love (2001), an adaptation of Marivaux’s play by the same name, with Mira Sorvino and Ben Kingsley, that competed at the 58th Venice Film Festival, as well as the television film Sauce for the Goose (1990), by Patricia Highsmith and with Ian McShane. She worked on the screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) and her husband Bernardo Bertolucci’s Luna (1979). She and Bertolucci co-wrote the screenplay for Besieged (1998) based on James Lasdun’s story “The Siege”.

Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna is dedicated to film and audiovisual preservation, restoration, promotion, training, research and publishing. In an era of vast technological, aesthetic and social change, the Cineteca’s mission is to safeguard, cultivate and disseminate cinema in all its forms. A pioneer in Italy, the Cineteca’s achievements in cataloguing, digitalization, study and research of paper and photographic archives has vastly illuminated the work of the last century’s great masters such as Charlie Chaplin, Vittorio De Sica and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Extensive collaboration with international archives and production companies, including Pathé, Gaumont, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, the Academy Film Archive and Institut Lumière, has made Cineteca’s lab L’Immagine Ritrovata one of the leading centers for film restoration. More than 800 titles have been restored over the past two decades, including masterpieces by Pasolini, Chaplin, Renoir, Resnais, Bertolucci, Fellini, Visconti, De Sica, Leone, Rossellini, Vigo and Keaton. Created over thirty years ago, its film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato is a landmark event for film historians, scholars and film buffs from around the world.