Born in Catanzaro, the 20th January 1945. Assistant to Vittorio De Seta, made his directorial debut in the 70s with some films for television (La fine del gioco, La citta’ del sole, Death at work, The Little Archimedes). At the cinema he debuted with Blow to the Heart (1982), which marks his first participation in the Venice Film Festival. The following films, I ragazzi di via Panisperna (1988), Porte aperte (1990), The Stolen Children (1992), shed light on a particular attention to History, the themes of work, and the relationship between generations, which will be almost a constant in his business to come. In 1994 he directs Lamerica, entirely set in post-communist Albania, in which he confirms a style with a strong realistic impact, but open to an epic vision, with influences wisely absorbed by classical Italian cinema. With the following The Way we Laughed (1998) he interweaves public experience and personal memory, representing internal emigration from the south to the north of Italy in the 50s. The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in the same year. In 2004 Amelio directs The Keys to the House, a story of the relationship between a young father and a disabled child, shot entirely in Berlin. Later, he created The Missing Star (2006), the story of an Italian worker who traveled from Shanghai to Mongolia looking for a piece of "his" factory bought by the Chinese. In 2010 Amelio faces the memory of Albert Camus's childhood in Algeria, as the great writer had told it in his unfinished book The First Man. The film wins the critics' prize at the Toronto Film Festival. In 2013, L’intrepido, still in competition in Venice, of 2017 Tenderness and the short film Someone else’s house. Amelio has directed the Turin Film Festival for four years, and has written books such as Il vizio del cinema, Un film che si chiama desiderio, L'ora di regia. He has written two novels Politeama, Mondadori, 2016 and Padre quotidiano, Mondadori, 2018. He is the only Italian director to be three-time winner of the EFA prize, also known as Felix. He currently teaches at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He’s taking care of the post-production of the new movie Hammamet
