Gualtiero Jacopetti on AllMovie

Gualtiero Jacopetti was one of the fathers of mondo or "shockumentary" cinema, a subgenre of lurid, sensational documentaries designed to present oddities, social taboos, horrors and vulgarities from around the world. Jacopetti started out as a journalist and then the chief editor of one of Italy's biggest magazines. In the late 1950s, he began writing commentary for and narrating documentaries. Jacopetti made his directorial debut with the notorious Mondo Cane, a film that presented some of the world's most brutal and cruelest customs including cannibalism and the on-screen slaughter of a pig. The film was a major success and so Jacopetti turned to making others even more graphic than Cane. Though he claimed that everything in the films actually happened, Jacopetti was widely accused of faking certain events.