Editor's blog

Italian Luciano TOVOLI is the winner of the prestigious award LIFETIME ACHIEVMENT GOLDEN CAMERA 300 at this year’s 33rd ICFF Manaki Brothers – Bitola.
The international Cinematographers Film Festival Manaki Brothers - Bitola and Vip operator, the official festival partner, this year award one of the greatest cinematographers of the Italian and world cinematography – Luciano TOVOLI, whose exceptionally fruitful opus rightfully places him among the members of the Club of Greats of the Manaki Brothers.
Luciano Tovoli, AIC/ASC was born in 1936 in Massa Marittima, Grosseto, Italy.

He studied foreign languages at the University of Pisa, and graduated at the celebrated Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In his fruitful career he has worked with a plead of the greatest Italian and international film directors: Vittorio de Seta, Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Brusati, Dario Argento,  Marco Ferreri, Ettore Scola, Barbet Schroeder, Francis Veber, Maurice Pialat, Nanni Moretti, etc, signing as much as over 80 long feature films and documentaries. Out of his many anthological achievements, the memory of the international audience and critics is set on: THE PASSENGER (1975, by Antonioni, for which Tovoli won the Silver Ribbon award of Italian film critics); DIARY OF A SCHOOLTEACHER (1971, long-feature documentary by director De Setta), CHINA (1972), another major documentary directed by Antonioni); BREAD AND CHOLCOLATE (1973, directed by Franco Brusati); THE LAST WOMAN (1975) and BYE, BYE, MONKEY (1977), both directed by Marco Ferreri; OCEANS (2008, another documentary master-piece directed by JAQUES PERRIN); SPLENDOUR (1989) and THE VOYAGE OF CAPTAIN FRACASSA (1990), both directed by Ettore Scola, which made Tovoli a laureate, the former with the critics’ award Silver Ribbon, and the latter with David Di Donattelo; KISS OF DEATH (1994, directed by Barbet Schroeder; SUSPIRIA (1976), a masterpiece of the horror genre by Dario Argento, with whom Tovoli, this year at Cannes presented their latest film shot in 3D – DARIO ARGENTO’S DRACULA.

Luciano TOVOLI, apart from the exceptional artistic and creative output which puts him straight at the top of the world cinematographers, is also renowned for his engagement for the cause of the artists-cinematographers, as initiator and founder of the European Federation of Cinematographers – IMAGO, for which he was proclaimed first Honorary Member in 2008.

This year’s thirty-third Festival edition takes place from 15th to 21st September 2012, traditionally in Bitola.