Giovanni Vento

Giovanni Vento (Rome 1927-79) was an Italian film critic, director, and screenwriter. Born of a large, humble family, whose apartment was hit from bombings on Rome in July 1943, he moved with his parents and siblings in a little town near Caserta. Back to Rome, Giovanni got a degree in accounting and started to attend classes in foreign languages in the University of Naples, without graduating. After marrying Margherita Garzoglio in Rome, in 1952 he started to collaborate with several leftist magazines and newspapers and with film magazines. His main interests were the battle for neorealism, against censorship and the Italian and European film production related to Resistance. An assistant for a few filmmakers since 1960, he collaborated particularly with Carlo Lizzani for several feature films. From 1961 to 1970 he directed a few short documentary films, produced from Corona Cinematografica and Unitelefilm, mostly dedicated to social issues and marginalized groups from the South, women, street children, veterans of Italian colonialism. He participated to the collective film I misteri di Roma, supervised by Cesare Zavattini and directed only one feature film, Il nero (1967), based and filmed mostly in Naples. Il nero, dealing with the story of five youngsters, some of whom "children of war" born of black GIs and Neapolitan women, despite an important premiere at Berlin International Film Festival, was never released commercially in theatres. Only in 2020, the film was rediscovered and restored by National Film Museum and released at Turin Film Festival.