Liliana Cavani

Liliana Cavani
Cavani, third from the right, at the 2009 Venice film festival, as member of the jury
Born	(1933-01-12) 12 January 1933 (age 84) Carpi, Modena, Italy
Alma mater	Bologna University (1960)
Occupation	Italian film director and screenwriter

Liliana Cavani (born 12 January 1933) is an Italian film director and screenwriter. She belongs to a generation of Italian filmmakers from Emilia-Romagna that came into prominence in the 1970s, including Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Marco Bellocchio. Cavani became internationally known after the success of her 1974 feature film Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter). Her films are intellectual and have historical concerns. In addition to feature films and documentaries, she has also directed opera.

Cavani was born in Carpi, near Modena in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Cavani's father, an architect from Mantua, belonged to a conservative bourgeois family of landowners. "My father was an architect interested in urban development. He took me to museums. He had worked in urban planning in Baghdad in 1956, when Iraq was still under British control. My mother was very strong, very capable, and very sweet", Cavani explained in an interview. Her mother was passionate about films and took her to the movies every Sunday from an early age. On her mother's side, Cavani came from a working-class family of militant antifascists. Her maternal grandfather, a syndicalist, introduced her to the works of Engels, Marx and Bakunin.

She graduated in literature and philology at Bologna University in 1960, writing a dissertation on the fifteenth-century poet and nobleman Marsilio Pio. She had intended to become an archeologist, a profession she soon abandoned in order to pursue her passion for the moving image. She attended Rome's renowned "Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia", (Experimental Cinematography Center) inaugurated by Benito Mussolini prior to World War II. She studied documentary filmmaking and obtained her diploma with the short films Incontro notturno (1961), about the friendship between two men, a white man and a Senegalese, and L'evento (1962) about a group of tourists who killed for fun.