AllMovie

An actor, screenwriter and filmmaker, Italy's Sandro Franchina is best known for his fascinating documentary biographies of modern artists such as Eliseo Mattiacci, Anish Kapoor, and his father, the sculptor Nino Franchina. Franchina's grandfather Gino Severini was a noted futurist painter. Franchina broke into show business at age 12 when director Roberto Rossellini, a long-time admirer of Franchina's father's work, cast the youth as Ingrid Bergman's ill-fated son in Europa 51/The Greatest Love (1952). As a young man, Franchina studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. His classmates included Marco Bellocchio, Paulo Cesar Saraceni and Gustavo Dahl. After graduation, Franchina worked with Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francais in Paris. He also spent considerable time with ethnological filmmaker Jean Rouch. Franchina made his first and only feature film, Morire Gratis in 1968, and that year won the Max Ophuls Prize for his efforts. In 1974, Franchina, with help from Langlois and Rouch, completed a documentary about Severini. In 1996, a retrospective of Franchina's work was held at the New York Museum of Modern Art.