VITTORIO DE SETA (1923–2011)

Vittorio de Seta, a famed documentarian, director, and screenwriter, has passed away at the age of eighty-eight, reports La Repubblica. Born in Palermo, Italy, in 1923, de Seta studied film in the 1940s, worked as the assistant to Mario Chiari in 1953 on the set of Midcentury Loves, and was also the assistant to Jean-Paul Le Chanois. He went on to direct a number of critically acclaimed documentaries in Sicily, Sardinia, and Calabria. His Isole di Fuoco (Fire Island), 1955, won the prize for best short documentary at Cannes Film Festival that year. De Seta directed Bandits of Orgosolo in 1961, written by his wife Vera Gherarducci. It won the Best First Feature Award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. His final work, Lettere dal Sahara_ (Letters from the Sahara), 2006, was included in the Venice Film Festival out of competition. His work was recently the focus of a 2006 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.