Happy 84th Paolo Taviani!

With his brother Vittorio, Paolo Taviani has been making visually stunning films since the early ’60s.

At the Cannes Film Festival the Taviani brothers won Palme d’Or for Padre Padrone in 1977 and Grand Prix du Jury for La Notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982). In 2012 they won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival with Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die).

The stars of Cesare Deve Morire Are Actual Prison Inmates

Celebrate Paolo and his brother by watching Cesare Deve Morire (Caesar Must Die) the poignant and profound story of inmates (real ones who are actually doing time in a Rome prison, who are staging a production of Julius Caesar. These men, nearly all incarcerated for drug trafficking or organized crime activity, played all the parts in the production and used it as an opportunity to tell their own stories as well as Shakespeare’s.

WATCH CESARE DEVE MORIRE ON NETFLIX

“We said they could use any name they like and make up biographical details but none did, they all told their real stories,” said Paolo Taviani. “They realized this film would be seen in theaters, maybe by people, by friends, who had forgotten them. This was their way of crying out: We’re here! We’re alive!”

Beginning with inmates auditions, the director tells the men to tell who they are and where they are from two times, once, sadly, as if their wife had just left them, and then with defiance and anger. The men who are chosen for the parts are stunning just trying out for the parts, weeping, growling, and whispering their names, the names of their fathers, and their hometowns.

And as the film progresses, the men learn their lines and practice scenes in their cells and behind the walls of the prison, with guards looking on, obviously very surprised by the emotion and the dedication to the project.

Paolo Taviani said “We hope that when the film is released to the general public that cinemagoers will say to themselves or even those around them… that even a prisoner with a dreadful sentence, even a life sentence, is and remains a human being”.