Gualtiero Jacopetti

Gualtiero Jacopetti
Jacopetti and Monica Vitti in the 1960s.
Born	(1919-09-04)4 September 1919 Barga, Tuscany, Italy
Died	17 August 2011(2011-08-17) (aged 91) Rome, Italy
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1962–1975

Gualtiero Jacopetti (4 September 1919 — 17 August 2011) was an Italian director of documentary films. With Paolo Cavara and Franco Prosperi, he is considered the originator of Mondo films, also called shockumentaries.

Gualtiero Jacopetti was born in Barga, in Northern Tuscany, in 1919. During World War II, he served in the Italian Resistance to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After the war, on the advice of his friend and mentor Indro Montanelli, he began to work as a journalist. He co-founded the influential liberal newsweekly Cronache (considered to be a direct predecessor to l'Espresso) in 1953, only to be forced to shut down production after publishing risque photographs of actress Sophia Loren which caused the paper to be charged with manufacturing and trading pornographic material (a charge which also earned Jacopetti a year-long prison sentence). He subsequently worked as a journalist, editor, newsreel writer, actor and short-subject film maker. He also worked on screenplays for René Clément (The Joy of Living, 1961) and Alessandro Blasetti (Europa Di Notte, 1959) before undertaking his own career as a director.

In 1960, he approached his colleagues Franco Prosperi and Paolo Cavara with the unusual idea of making an "anti-documentary". The result, which premiered in 1962, was Mondo Cane (which roughly translates to "A Dog's World," a minor curse in Italian), a non-narrative compilation of shocking and unusual footage from around the world. It premiered at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival, where it was well-received and even nominated for the Palme d'Or. The theme song, More (Theme from Mondo Cane) by Italian composer Riz Ortolani was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song in 1963, the year of its premier in the United States.