GRAN PREMIO

curated by Bruno Di Marino

This overdue tribute is intended to rediscover Vittorio Armentano (1934-2026). He was one of those elusive, overlooked filmmakers who cannot really be ascribed to experimental cinema proper, but his relevance to the cinema of research is undeniable. Armentano self-produced hundreds of short and medium-length films through Quadro Film, the company he founded, from 1985 onwards, but throughout the 1960s he pushed the boundaries of ‘pure’ documentary creating a powerfully sinister picture of daily life, that privileged storytelling at times and a surreal and dreamlike approach at others. The use of peculiar techniques and devices contributed to the latter result, such as filming handheld subjective shots with a wide-angle lens to transfigure the source material and plunge us into a deformed reality. Or the continuous iterations, unexpected associations, and a non-linear editing to inform the sequence succession. The resulting short films, in some cases, attain powerful visual impact, including from a chromatic point of view – a fairly substantial component, given Armentano’s passion for painting and the visual arts in general.
Like several other filmmakers and artists of his generation (from Scavolini to Brocani, and Grifi to Patella), Armentano collaborated with small production companies such as Nasso and Documento Film, which by commissioning 10 to 12-minute films could compete for the Quality Awards and obtain government financing. In addition, the director could avail himself of a small circle of collaborators, the most notable of whom were DoP Giulio Albonico and musician Egisto Macchi. Macchi was largely ‘responsible’ for moving Armentano’s work away from a realist perspective and towards a dimension of more detached anthropological observation, which helped to bring the elements of psychosis and alienation that permeated the merciless consumer society to the fore.
In the context of 1960s Italy, where cinema was besieged by the neorealist ‘dictatorship,’ Armentano felt like an odd one out. In a conversation in 2019, he said, “Now, to be honest, I never liked Neorealism. I had studied other things, anthropology, psychoanalysis. But it felt like there was no room for anything different. So I wondered whether I could address certain social issues through a new language. For this reason, in the group I hung around with – Del Fra, Cecilia Mangini, Micciché, and others – I was considered a sort of black sheep, though I got on well with everyone. […] Then, to prove that something different could be achieved, I took two or three typically neorealist themes and tried to make slightly different films on these subjects: Pignoramento and Cantiere 62.”

Vittorio Armentano Conte (Grosseto, 4 June 1934 – Rome, 28 February 2026). Having abandoned his medical studies, he worked as a journalist, publishing articles in various trade magazines, such as Filmselezione and, from 1959 to 1962, in the weekly Il Punto. In 1962, Armentano began his career as a film director, making short films, adverts (for companies such as Fiat and Italgas), and various types of documentaries, ranging from industrial films to films on art, a sector in which he specialised. However, his shorts display a particularly experimental style, partly due to the use of peculiar techniques and devices as seen in Modelling, L’ultimo, La lotta, Le voci secche, Le immagini and many others. Meanwhile, in works such as Natura decomposta, Trasformazioni marine, A colori and Image In, he combined painting, literature, poetry, and visual poetry (see his long-time collaboration with Emilio Villa). Over the course of a decade, Armentano produced an impressive number of works – around eighty in total – relying on a small circle of collaborators, notably the director of photography Giulio Albonico and the musician Egisto Macchi. In the mid-1970s, among other things, he directed the medium-length films Il grande barocco romano, Dal Borromini al Guarini, and Il Futurismo for the series “Enciclopedia dell’arte italiana” produced by Istituto Luce. From 1968 onwards, he began working for Rai. Over the following decades, he made filmed reports for various TV shows, including “Medicina oggi” and “Settimo giorno,” as well as the series dedicated to the great conductors. Therefore, he went on to specialise in music-related documentaries. In 1985, he founded the limited company Quadro Film together with Claudio Forges Davanzati and Giorgio Chessari (later joined by Enrico Agapito), becoming its sole administrator in 1987. Thus Armentano produced and directed hundreds of documentaries, series and television specials, with a particular focus on the arts. Armentano participated in leading film festivals, including: Festival dei Popoli in Florence, Leipzig, Prague, Este, Trieste, Venice, Cannes, and New York. His film L’ultimo (1966) received a plaque at the Venice Film Festival and was longlisted for an Oscar, whilst Scenotecnica (1972) was awarded at the Amsterdam International Industrial Film Festival and the New Delhi International Film Festival.

Following its launch last year, the Adriano agli Amici event returns to pay continued homage to the figure of Adriano Aprà within the framework of the Pesaro Film Festival. The programme revolves around the symposium “Il mio metodo: Rossellini-Aprà:” scholars, filmmakers, and cultural organisers will engage in maieutic exchange and critical dialogue to reflect on the definition of a method. With an approach indebted to the practice of Roberto Rossellini, we will examine the forms of knowledge through active, intergenerational exchange, in which the master recognises themselves in the pupil and vice versa.
Images will follow words in the retrospective section, which is dedicated to the filmography of Vittorio Armentano (1934-2026), an anomalous and lesser-known filmmaker who created a free, original cinema spanning experimentation, anthropological investigation, and documentary practice. Alongside the retrospective, the programme includes a complementary survey of contemporary films stemming from the Fuorinorma experience, with their directors in attendance. The aim is to spotlight the diversity and artistic-expressive vitality of a certain kind of Italian cinema: from experimental animation to creative documentaries, from the creative re-use of archive footage to political, militant cinema.
The second Adriano agli Amici Award will be presented to Livio Jacob in recognition of his painstaking, devoted, and invaluable work in preserving, conserving, and promoting early cinema, driven by a fervent cinephile passion.
Therefore, this year too, the Adriano agli Amici initiative aspires to offer viewers a small prism of images and reflections following in the footsteps of Adriano Aprà as well as those of the much-loved Roberto Rossellini, to conceive of cinema as “the extraordinary pleasure of experiencing the adventure of life.”

Mattia Cinquegrani, Bruno Di Marino, Paolo Lanari, Alessia Lombardini, Stefania Parigi, Patrizia Pistagnesi, Marco Polimeni, Giacomo Ravesi, Cristina Torelli