Masterclass with Matteo Garrone
From the gritty social realism of Gomorrah to the dark fairy-tale worlds of Pinocchio and the human odyssey of Io Capitano, the Italian director has fashioned one of contemporary European cinema’s most distinctive and unpredictable bodies of work.
Matteo Garrone is a filmmaker who refuses to be categorised. Equally at home exploring the brutal mechanics of organised crime, the absurdities of celebrity culture, the grotesque imaginings of ancient fairy tales or the desperate realities of migration, he has built a filmography distinguished by its visual audacity, psychological acuity and restless curiosity about human nature.
There is, however, a recognisable thread running through his work: a fascination with outsiders, individuals consumed by their desires and people struggling against circumstances that threaten to overwhelm them. His films may inhabit radically different worlds, but they share an extraordinary sensitivity to faces, physical environments and the strange poetry of everyday existence.
Garrone’s journey into cinema was not conventional. Born in Rome in 1968, he grew up in a modest family immersed in the arts. His father, Nico Garrone, was a respected theatre critic and writer, his mother a photographer, while his stepfather worked as a cinematographer. His grandfather was also an actor. Theatre, photography and cinema were therefore familiar surroundings, although filmmaking was not initially an obvious career destination.
After graduating from art school in 1986, Garrone worked as an assistant camera operator before devoting himself to painting. His interest in composition, colour, light and the representation of reality would eventually become central to his cinematic language. He has often described cinema as another form of painting, an opportunity to bring images to life and explore the world through movement rather than the static frame.
A serious tennis injury had already put paid to his youthful ambitions, and it was in his mid-twenties that he began experimenting with filmmaking. Encouraged by his cinematographer stepfather and working with leftover film stock, he made his first short film, Silhouette (1996), which won a prize at Nanni Moretti’s Sacher Festival. Its subject, Nigerian prostitutes living on the outskirts of Rome, introduced an interest in marginalised communities that would remain a constant throughout his career.
His first feature, Terra di mezzo (1997), developed from this material, weaving together three stories about immigrants and people living on the edges of Italian society. Ospiti (1998) continued the exploration of displacement, while Estate romana (2000) offered a more eccentric portrait of Rome and its artistic inhabitants. Already, Garrone was demonstrating an instinct for finding visual drama in overlooked environments and unexpected characters.
It was L’imbalsamatore (The Embalmer, 2002), however, that brought him wider critical recognition. Inspired by a real criminal case, this unsettling psychological drama follows Peppino, a diminutive taxidermist who develops an obsessive relationship with a handsome young man, Valerio, before jealousy and manipulation enter the picture. Garrone transforms the material into something approaching a modern gothic tale, balancing grotesque humour with disturbing psychological intimacy. It also established his ability to make the ordinary feel strange, even nightmarish.
With Primo Amore (First Love, 2004), he explored another destructive obsession, this time a man’s fixation with female physical perfection and his increasingly controlling relationship with a young woman. The film confirmed his interest in the darker territories of desire, possession and psychological violence.
Then came Gomorrah (2008), the film that catapulted him onto the international stage. Adapted from Roberto Saviano’s incendiary investigation into the Neapolitan Camorra, it rejected the familiar conventions of the gangster film in favour of a sprawling, interconnected portrait of a society in which organised crime had become an everyday economic and social reality.
Rather than concentrating on a single protagonist, Garrone followed several lives: young boys seduced by the fantasy of criminal power, workers caught in the illegal waste industry, a tailor entangled in the fashion business and individuals attempting to survive within a system governed by corruption and violence.
The result was a remarkable work of social observation, drawing on real locations, non-professional performers and a documentary-like immediacy. Its Grand Prix victory at Cannes in 2008 established Garrone as one of Europe’s most compelling directors. Yet, rather than repeating the formula, he immediately moved in a different direction.
Reality (2012) was a darkly comic examination of the seduction of celebrity culture. Luciano, a Neapolitan fishmonger played by Aniello Arena, becomes consumed by the possibility of appearing on Big Brother. What begins as a comic portrait of social aspiration gradually becomes a disturbing study of delusion and the need for recognition. As Luciano loses his grip on reality, Garrone transforms contemporary Naples into a colourful, carnivalesque landscape in which the protagonist’s fantasies increasingly take over his existence. The film won Garrone his second Grand Prix at Cannes, an exceptional achievement.
His next project was even more unexpected. Tale of Tales (2015), his first entirely English-language feature, adapted three stories from Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth-century collection Pentamerone. With Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones and John C. Reilly among its international cast, the film plunged into a world of monsters, grotesque transformations, sexual obsession and impossible desires. Far removed from the social realism of Gomorrah, it nevertheless retained Garrone’s fascination with the extremes of human behaviour. Drawing on painters including Goya, he created an extraordinary visual universe that was simultaneously sumptuous, unsettling and darkly comic.
He returned to contemporary reality with Dogman (2018), a bleak and deeply affecting drama inspired loosely by a notorious Italian criminal case. Marcello, a gentle dog groomer played by Marcello Fonte, finds himself increasingly dominated by Simone, a violent former boxer. Their relationship becomes an examination of intimidation, dependency and the gradual destruction of personal dignity. Fonte’s extraordinary performance earned him the Best Actor award at Cannes, while Garrone’s atmospheric portrait of a decaying coastal community provided one of the director’s most accomplished visual settings. It is a film that combines the brutality of his earlier work with the dark fairy-tale sensibility developed in Tale of Tales.
With Pinocchio (2019), Garrone returned to one of Italy’s most cherished literary creations, but deliberately avoided the sanitised conventions of the familiar children’s adventure. His adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s novel is an earthy, often grotesque fable, populated by fantastical creatures and unsettling encounters. Roberto Benigni, who had previously directed and starred in his own version, plays Geppetto, while Federico Ielapi takes the role of the wooden puppet. Elaborate prosthetics, physical effects and extraordinary production design give the film a tactile quality, as Garrone revisits the darker origins of the original story. It also represents a return to the imaginative world of childhood that first inspired his artistic ambitions.
His most recent major feature, Io Capitano (2023), marked another significant evolution. Following two Senegalese teenagers, Seydou and Moussa, on their perilous journey from Dakar towards Europe, the film turns the familiar migration narrative around, placing the audience inside the experience of those making the journey rather than observing them from the European destination.
Drawing on the testimonies of migrants who had endured the Sahara, human trafficking, imprisonment and the Mediterranean crossing, Garrone constructed a narrative that combines harrowing realism with moments of almost mythic beauty. He worked closely with people familiar with these experiences, recognising the importance of approaching a world outside his own cultural background with sensitivity and authenticity.
The casting of Seydou Sarr, who had no previous acting experience, was crucial. His performance as the young Seydou brings extraordinary emotional immediacy to a story that might otherwise have become an abstract account of political and humanitarian crisis. Garrone’s visual imagination is particularly striking in the desert sequences and the desperate final sea crossing, where the physical ordeal becomes an epic journey of survival.
Io Capitano won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, while Sarr received the Marcello Mastroianni Award. The film subsequently became Italy’s submission for the 2024 Academy Awards, receiving an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film.
Looking across Garrone’s filmography, it is striking how little he has repeated himself. After the international success of Gomorrah, he could easily have established himself as a specialist in crime cinema. Instead, he turned to reality television, seventeenth-century folklore, psychological violence, children’s literature and migration. Each project represents a new visual and narrative challenge, yet the same underlying interests remain.
His protagonists are frequently outsiders, driven by desires that become destructive or trapped in circumstances over which they have little control. His locations are never simply backdrops: they are living environments that shape the characters and their destinies. And his painterly instincts are evident everywhere, from the carefully composed faces and interiors of The Embalmer to the expansive landscapes of Io Capitano.
There are echoes of Italian neorealism, certainly, alongside the grotesque and surreal traditions of filmmakers such as Marco Ferreri and Pier Paolo Pasolini. But Garrone has fashioned a sensibility distinctly his own, moving effortlessly between documentary observation and visual fantasy.
Perhaps his greatest achievement is his ability to find something extraordinary in apparently ordinary people without romanticising their circumstances or excusing their behaviour. His cinema is compassionate but rarely sentimental, visually beautiful even when depicting deeply disturbing realities.
For a filmmaker who began by painting, cinema has become a means of exploring the world in all its contradictions, cruelties and unexpected beauty. And with Io Capitano, Garrone demonstrated once again that the boundaries of that world remain far wider than anyone might have imagine
MASTERCLASS WITH MATTEO GARRONE | CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL