Tonino Guerra
Antonio "Tonino" Guerra (16 March 1920 – 21 March 2012) was an Italian poet, writer and screenwriter who collaborated with some of the most prominent film directors in the world. Life and work. Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna. According to his obituary in "The Guardian", Guerra first started writing poetry when interned in a prison camp in Germany, after being rounded up at the age of 22 with other antifascists from Santarcangelo. At 30 he moved to Rome and worked as a schoolteacher. During this time he met Elio Petri, the future director of "Investigation of a  Citizen Above Suspicion" (1970), who worked as assistant to Giuseppe De Santis. Guerra was able to get his first screenwriting credit after he and Petri went to the Abruzzi mountains to find out about wolf-hunting; "Though they discovered that wolf hunters no longer existed, De Santis went ahead anyway with the film, "Uomini e Lupi" (Men and Wolves, 1957)". Although a follower of Cesare Zavattini, who essentially defined the style and morals of Italian neorealism, Guerra deviated from his mentor: while Zavattini brought the directors with whom he collaborated over to his own social and moral speculation, Guerra went  to the filmmakers and helped them advance their own concept. He worked with such filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni, in "L'avventura", "La notte", "L'Eclisse", "The Red Desert", "Blowup", "Zabriskie Point" and "Identification of a Woman"; Federico Fellini, in "Amarcord"; Theo Angelopoulos, in "Landscapes in the Mist", "Eternity and a Day" and ""; Andrei Tarkovsky, in "Nostalghia"; and Francesco Rosi, in "The Mattei Affair", "Lucky Luciano" and "Exquisite Corpses". In 1990 Guerra in collaboration with Giovanni Urbinati to create the exhibition “La Cattedrale dove va a dormire il mare/The Cathedral where the sea goes to sleep” at the deconsecrated church in Budrio  near Bologna. In 1995 he was awarded with an Honorable Diploma at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival. He was an atheist.