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LIFE AS A B MOVIE: PIERO VIVARELLI

By Fabrizio LAURENTI, Nick VIVARELLI

SUMMERSIDE MEDIA - as SALES All rights, World

Documentary - Completed 2019

- Year of production
- 2019
- Genres
- Documentary, Art - Culture, Biography
- Countries
- ITALY
- Languages
- ITALIAN
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 88 mn
- Director(s)
- Fabrizio LAURENTI, Nick VIVARELLI
- Synopsis
- The unbridled life and kaleidoscopic filmography of Piero Vivarelli, who made Italian B-movies of all genres, wrote hit rock songs and penned the screenplay for Sergio Corbucci's Western "Django," adored by Quentin Tarantino, are intertwined in a portrait of an unsung postwar pop culture maverick, provocateur and revolutionary (the only non-Cuban besides Che Guevara to be given a Cuban Communist Party card signed by Fidel Castro).
  The creative doc is also a prism into an unexplored “secret” history of Italian B-movies cinema encapsulated in the doc as the “left sidewalk of the Via Veneto” which is “where the leftists and the hookers hung out.” It explores a cinematic world with analogies to Roger Corman’s alternative productions but at the same time delves into the particular energy that prompted Tarantino’s passion for the Italian B-movie masters.
  Vivarelli’s musical movies featured Italian rocker Adriano Celentano and sublime singer Mina alongside Chet Baker during his drugged-out Italian interlude. His erotic/exotic cult title "The Snake God" (1970) was in the Kings of the Italian B-’s retrospective at Venice, godfathered by Tarantino in 2004. “Snake God” is the first work within a trilogy also comprising “Black Decameron,” shot in Senegal and featuring an acting turn by late great Senegalese cinema pioneer Djibril Diop Mambéty, and “Codice D’Amore Orientale,” based on the Kama Sutra and shot in Thailand.