PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI

Two of the few remaining heavyweights of classic Italian cinema, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani were born 8 November 1931 and 20 September 1929 respectively, in San Miniato, Tuscany, Italy. Vittorio was a law student at the University of Pisa. He became interested in cinema after seeing Roberto Rossellini's Paisan (1946). After writing and directing several short films and plays with his brother, he made his first feature in 1962. They are brothers, who have always worked together, each directing alternate scenes. Paolo's wife Lina Nerli Taviani has been costume designer of many of their films.

The brothers went ahead to win the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI prize for Padre padrone in 1977, a beautifully shot oddest of countryside hardship.  They also won the Grand Prix du Jury for La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982) in which their distinct style is embedded. In 2012 they won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival with Caesar Must Die. Vittorio was Member of the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1984 and a recipient of the Sergei Parajanov award at the Yerevan Int'l Film Festival.

Many of their collaborators admit that the brothers direct as one person, Marcello Mastroianni, the actor who worked with them on the 1974 classic, Allonsanfàn used to refer to both men separately as “Paolovittorio”. To this, the brothers say that they have very different characters but the same nature, and that their choices in life and art are the same.

Each brother works on one scene at a time, if there are an uneven number of scenes in a film, they flip a coin to see who'll do what. When they ran into the Coen brothers, both pairs got into a debate as to how it was possible to work with each other but eventually came to an agreement that the origins of paired sibling cinema should remain a mystery.

The brothers' film career is still thriving; take for example the 2012 release – Caesar Must Die which dealt with Inmates in a high-security prison preparing for a public performance of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." The brothers pulled this off with their personal philosophy which is to love and respect the individual. It is the individual's relationship with the breadth of nature that constitutes the tension which is perhaps the essence of human existence. But for the inmates deprived of their relationship with nature, the only connection they had with something bigger than themselves is their death. The part of nature that they felt the strongest relationship with was time. And time is their condemnation. They couldn't do anything about it – they were powerless. Time was the voice of nature to them.