Marco Ponti

Marco Ponti (born 25 July 1967, in Avigliana, Piedmont) is an Italian film director.

He graduated in Modern Letters at the University of Turin and started working as a copywriter and as an assistant at the Faculty of Semiotics at the University of Turin. In 1995 he attended a scriptwriting course the Holden School in Turin; the following year he worked at the same place under the direction of Alessandro Baricco. In 1997 he attended a course for movie writers at the RAI Cinema Fiction School; in the same year he published a book dedicated to Quentin Tarantino.

After writing and/or directing some award winning shorts (Benevenuto a San Salvario won the European Film Award in 1998; Amsterdam won an award for the best short feature and for the best actor at the Saint Vincent Festival in 1999), his debut feature film as a writer / director, Santa Maradona, in 2001 has been one of the smash hits of the year.

Starring Stefano Accorsi, Libero De Rienzo, Anita Caprioli e Mandala Tayde, the movie won two David di Donatello Awards (the award given by the Italian Academy of Motion Pictures) in 2002 for Best New Director and Best Supporting Actor, the Ciak d'Oro Award 2002 (given by the most influential movie magazine, Ciak) and, always in the same year, the Critics Award and Best Actor in the International Film Festival of Mar del Plata (Argentina).

The movie repeated his success in the DVD edition, reaching number 1 in the charts, and achieving the cult status between Italian moviegoers (same happened for the soundtrack CD). Now, it is considered the movie who defined the post-gen X in Italy. Santa Maradona became as well a popular movie in the film festivals circuit (from Toronto to Cuba, from Burkina Faso to Japan, from Berkeley to Sydney) and has been broadcast in several countries all around the five continents, and was chosen by Wim Wenders in 2003 as a case study in new film-making in the Berlin Film Festival.

In 2004, Marco Ponti writes and direct his sophomore movie: A/R Andata + Ritorno (Round Trip) starring again Libero De Rienzo with Spanish beauty Vanessa Incontrada and the Indian star Kabir Bedi. The movie was in top ten charts both in theaters and DVD sells and was screened, between others, in the Mill Valley Film Festival (US), Honolulu, New Zealand and Australia.

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