GRIMALDI, AURELIO

(1957-)

Novelist, screenwriter, director. Grimaldi began as a writer in the late 1980s recounting his experience as a teacher in a Palermo juvenile prison. He subsequently adapted one of his novels set in a Sicilian reformatory as the screenplay ofMarco Risi'sMeryper sempre(Forever Mary, 1989), which received the Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes that year. This was followed byRagazzi fuori(Boys on the Outside, 1990), effectively a sequel toMery, which followed the lives of the young juveniles once they had been discharged.

After scriptingUomo di rispetto(Man of Respect, 1992), one ofDamiano Damiani's films on the Mafia, and providing the subject for Felice Farina'sUltimo respiro(The Last Breath, 1992), Grimaldi began writing and directing his own films, beginning withLa discesa di Acld a Floristella(Acid's Descent into Floristella, 1992), a story about child labor and exploitation, andLa ribelle(The Rebel, 1993), a portrait of Enza, a streetwise but sexually innocent 16-year-old juvenile, convincingly played by a young Penelope Cruz.AfterLe Buttane(The Whores, 1994), another hard-edged portrayal of the life of a group of Sicilian prostitutes, Grimaldi went even further with the provocativeNerolio.Sputerb su mio padre(Blackoil:I Will Spit on My Father), a fictional portrait of the last days ofPier Paolo Pasolini(made in 1996 but only released in Italy two years later). There followedIl macellaio(The Butcher, 1998) andLa donna lupo(The Man-Eater, 1999) before Grimaldi returned to Pasolini withUn mondo d'amore(A World of Love, 2001), this time focusing on an earlier period of Pasolini's life. A year later, still obsessed with Pasolini, as he himself admitted, Grimaldi produced a contemporary Neapolitan remake of Pasolini'sMamma Roma(1962) with hisRosa Funzeca(2002). The erotic-libertine dimension present in the earlier films was made more explicit in Grimaldi's most recent film,L'educazione sentimentale di Eugenie(The Sentimental Education of Eugenie, 2005), loosely adapted from the Marquis de Sade.