Quilici, Folco

Folco Quilici was born in Ferrara on April 9, 1930. He was a documentary filmmaker, writer, essayist, and television author. He made his cinema debut with the film Attorno a una scogliera (1952), an expanded version of the earlier Pinne e arpioni, shot in Sardinia in 1949 as his admission project for the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. In his first feature film, Sesto continente (1954), filmed in the Red Sea, Quilici alternates observations on the unusual habits of marine fauna with scenes of daily life on board and sequences of underwater hunting. In 1958 he married the artist Laura Grisi, with whom he would collaborate professionally until the early 1970s. With the film Ultimo paradiso, he initiated the so-called “Polynesian cycle,” which includes the feature films Ti-Koyo e il suo pescecane (1962), loosely inspired by a novel by Clement Richer and reworked by Italo Calvino in the story Fratello pescecane, as well as Oceano (1971) and Fratello mare (1975). In these works, Quilici blends the evocative atmospheres of Technicolor with a documentary approach, introducing fictional elements that allow him to explore themes linked to ecological ethics.

For television, in addition to an extensive body of documentary work, he conceived and produced several important multi-episode series: L’alba dell’uomo (1970–1974); Civiltà del Mediterraneo (1972–1976), under the historical supervision of Fernand Braudel; L’uomo europeo (1976–1979), featuring contributions from Jorge Luis Borges and Claude Lévi-Strauss; L’Italia dal cielo (1964–1978), which included texts by major Italian writers; and finally Storia d’Italia del XX secolo (1992–2000).

Folco Quilici passed away in Orvieto on February 24, 2018.

Film director, photographer, and writer