Fourth Annual Symposium
New Trends in Modern and Contemporary Italian Cinema

After earning a degree in philosophy and attending both the "Paolo Grassi" Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Milan, Torre relocated to Palermo in 1990. Throughout the 90s, she shot numerous short films that earned her various prizes in Italian and international cinematographic festivals.

Her breakthrough came in 1997 with her first feature-length film, Tano da morire (To Die For Tano), an original and surprising musical ironical about the mafia. The film was presented at the Venice Film Festival and won numerous prizes. Her musical about African immigrants in Sicily, Sud Side Stori, was released in 2000 to high acclaim, followed by the dramatic film Angela, which was presented at Cannes. Torre’s 2006 film Mare nero (Dark Sea), a film noir about dark obsessions, was presented at the Locarno Film Festival that year.

In 2007, Roberta Torre founded the production company Rosettafilm, through which she produced two documentaires about neighborhoods on the outskirts of Rome, followed by the comedy I baci mai dati (Lost Kisses), which was presented at the Venice Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize for world cinema at Sundance. She is currently working on a new feature film, Rose e matematica (Roses and Mathematics), about her grandfather, the aeronautical engineer Pier Luigi Torre.

For many years, Delli Colli has performed interviews and investigations in the field of cinema and its protagonists. She first worked as an agency reporter, then as a contributor for La Repubblica, and finally as an envoy for the newsmagazine Panorama. She has published, among other works, Fare cinema: sui mestieri del set (Filmaking: Working on a movie set, Gremese, 1986), Monica Vitti (Gremese, 1987), Notorius personaggi incerca di popolarità (Notorious Characters Looking for Popularity, Lupetti, 1986), and L’indice dei famosi (The Index of the Famous, Franco Angeli, 2007). She has also written the following notable books: Eur, si gira (Lupetti, 1995), Eur è cinema (Eur is cinema, Palombi, 2009), and the long series Il gusto del cinema italiano e internazionale (The Taste of Italian and International Cinema, Elleu cinema, 2002-07 and Cooper, 2007-2011), a passionate and original sociological investigation of the relationship between cinema and the dining table.

For the Cinecittà editions,she has edited monographs on Gianni Amelio (2006) and Marco Tullio Giordana (2007), and published Ferzan Ozpetek: ad occhi aperti (Ferzan Ozpetek: Eyes Wide Open, Mondadori Electa, 2009). The works were presented in America at the time of the monographic exhibitions at the MoMa in New York and in Los Angeles. For three years she has overseen in Los Angeles the selection of the films for "Cinema Italian Style", an exhibition that launches in Hollywood the Italian film chosen for Oscar candidacy.

After completing his Ph.D. dissertation, focused on Italian Silent Comedies, he taught at Università di Urbino and Università Cattolica di Milano. Since 2005 he serves as associate professor at Bologna University where he teaches Italian Film History, Documentary, Audiovisual Popular Culture.

From 2007 to 2010, Manzoli directed the Study Program in Cinema, Musica, Performing and Visual Arts (DAMS) and he is currently vice-director of the Department of Music and Performing Arts of Bologna University. He is an elected member of the Italian University Committee (CUN). He has given lectures and has taught at several Italian and foreign universities including Tongji University (Shanghai) and Brown University (Providence, RI) in 2011.

He is a member of the editorial staff of the Italian film review Bianco & Nero and part of the editorial board of the series of film studies books "Italiana" (il Castoro, Milano) and "Cinema Quality Paperbacks" (Carocci, Roma).

Manzoli has published books on Italian film history (Voce e Silenzio nel Cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini and Cinema e letteratura) and about one hundred essays in national and international film journals and edited books. He just finished a forthcoming study about Italian genre movies of the economic miracle (Carocci Editore, Roma). His current research involves popular cinema in Italy from 1958 to the present in the perspective of cultural studies.

She is the author of An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron, (Stanford French and Italian Studies, 1979), Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, 1986), Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation (Johns Hopkins, 1993), After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Johns Hopkins, 2002), and Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (University of Toronto, 2007), as well as journal articles and encyclopedia entries on her fields of interest. Because literacy in the 21st century must be broadened to include the mass media as well as the written text, she brings a cultural studies approach to her teaching and research at Yale University.