Paolo Taviani obituary

Acclaimed Italian film-writer and director who worked in tandem with his brother Vittorio for six decades

The Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo, wrote and directed 21 feature films and two television movies together, in a career that spanned six decades. The elder, Vittorio, died in 2018; Paolo, two years younger, has died aged 92 after a short illness.

Influenced by the Italian neo-realism of Roberto Rossellini, the brothers started their feature film-making in the heady days of the Italian cinematic boom of the 1960s, alongside contemporaries such as Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, producing politically themed dramas. In the 70s, they soon carved a distinctive niche for themselves, often adapting literary source material – Leo Tolstoy and Luigi Pirandello were especial favourites – with an underlying leftward leaning liberal political sensibility and fashioning a style that mixed almost documentary authenticity with playful comic fantasy.