Salvatore - This Is Life
 

Director: Gian Paolo Cugno
Screenplay: Gian Paolo Cugno, Paolo di Reda
Photography: Gino Sgreva
Music: Paolo Vivaldi
Cast: Enrico Lo Verso, Galatea Ranzi, Giancarlo Giannini, Gabriele Lavia, Lucia Sardo, Ernesto Mahieux, Maurizio Nicolosi, Alessandro Mallia
Editing: Ugo De Rossi
Production: The Walt Disney Company Italia-Globe Films; Producer Pietro Innocenzi
International Distribution: Buena Vista International, via Cantalupo in Sabina 29, 00191 Rome - Italy, tel. +39 06 330831,
fax +39 06 33083270, e-mail: kristin.greiner@disney.com
Year: 2006. Running Time: 90’
 
Gian Paolo Cugno’s first feature takes place in Pachino, the Sicilian town where he was born. “Salvatore” is about the friendship that springs up between a boy who's lost his parents and his new elementary school teacher from northern Italy, played by accomplished actor Enrico Lo Verso. As their relationship develops, the teacher is surprised at how stoically Salvatore bears his hard life, while the boy sees in him his missing father. Cugno’s Sicily is described with incisive realism and modernity as a land still tied to its ancient customs, even as it changes under the onslaught of new technology such as Internet.
 
 

 
  
 
 

 

                 

     
Gian Paolo Cugno 
He presently lives in Rome. After publishing two novels, Walking in the Dark and Nobody’s Wife, he became an assistant director and worked in Sicilian productions. He made a number of documentaries about Italian cities of art and in 2003 he directed his first short, The Mother’s Face. Salvatore - This is Life is his first long feature film.