IL PORTIERE DI NOTTE
Italy, 1974, 120’
In Vienna, in 1957, the Jewish wife of an orchestra conductor acknowledges the SS officer who was his tormentor in the concentration camp in the night porter of his hotel. Between the two there was a sadomasochistic relationship that is now reborn violently. The man kidnaps the woman hunted by former Nazis who want to eliminate her because she is a dangerous witness.
Liliana Cavani, was born in Carpi in the province of Modena. She spent her childhood and adolescence first in Carpi, then in Bologna, where she graduated in Ancient Letters. Subsequently she obtained a specialization in History of Language (or Linguistic Philology with a thesis on the dialect of her region).
During her university years, she was culturally interested in cinema and founded a film club; here she projects with preference films she could not see in the provincial halls because they did not arrive there, such as the works of Italian neorealism. In 1960, she moved to Rome and graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. In 1961, the RAI (Radio- Television- Italian) announces a competition for officials in which she participates, resulting in one of the thirty people who pass the tests on ten thousand candidates. It is an opportunity to make documentaries and political and social surveys for TV. Many years later, in 2012, she made a documentary on the monastic order of the CLARISSE nuns interviewed in their convent in Urbino.
On 27 November 2015 she was awarded the Honorary Citizenship of Assisi.
In 2018 - "Il Portiere di Notte" the 75th Venice International Film Festival presents the film very well restored by the Cineteca Nazionale with Istituto Luce - Cinecittà in the "Classics" section of the competition.
In the same year, again as part of the Venice Film Festival, the Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo and the Rivista del Cinematografo awarded her with the Bresson Award 2018, awarded for the first time to a female director.
In 2019 - at the 69th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival Liliana Cavani presented Charlotte Rampling with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
