Italian National Film Institute

About

On 3 April 1935, Luigi Freddi, head of Italy's General Cinema Office, founds the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and installs Luigi Chiarini as its first director. The school's original concept traces back to a 1930 acting course that director Alessandro Blasetti ran together with Anton Giulio Bragaglia. Its permanent home at Via Tuscolana 1520 in Rome, designed by architects Antonio Valente and Pietro Aschieri, is inaugurated in 1940 with Mussolini in attendance. The Cineteca Nazionale, Italy's national film archive, is established by law in 1949. Among the school's graduates are directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Marco Bellocchio, Liliana Cavani, and Roberto Faenza, and it is counted as the world's second-oldest film school after Moscow's VGIK, founded in 1919. In 1955 the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez enrolls in the directing course under Cesare Zavattini, with the backing of Fernando Birri. He and Birri later join forces to help found Cuba's national film school.