Claudio Gubitosi

Claudio Gubitosi, fifty-three years old. Married with two children. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Giffoni Film Festival.He directed his first film at the age of sixteen, revealing a promising, poetic style in his filmmaking. He was a tenacious young man with important dreams.

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Didascalia = Claudio Gubitosi, direttore artistico del Giffoni Film Festival

Early Days

At the age of eighteen these dreams became more concrete and his passion for cinema was the basis for a risky “invention”, the Giffoni International Festival of Cinema for Young People. The event was destined to become known as the Giffoni Film Festival, an event that Gubitosi has directed with inexhaustible creative energy for the past 35 years and that has now become one of the most prestigious annual events on the world cinema calendar.Thanks to his work, cinema for young people found a precise identity and authority both in Italy and abroad, something it had never had before.His Festival programme, at the same time popular and yet severe, became a constant reference point for many other cinema events.Creative, but also an innovative organiser, the “Director”, as he is affectionately known to his staff, has received numerous awards from both public and private organisations for his work, among which are the AGIS (Italian Association for Cinematographic, Theatrical and other Entertainment Activities) Golden Cross, the Timone d'Oro for Tourism and prestigious acknowledgements from social, cultural and economical, both national and international, organisations.

Recent Involvements

Recently, in San Patrignano during the European Summit of Ministers of Education and Juvenile Policies, he was awarded the prestigious Rainbow 2003 Award with the following reason: “For having had an innovative and creative idea that he pledged and pushed in order for it to grow where problems are at their utmost; transferring culture, commitment, happiness and joy to the community of young people throughout the world.” His creative activity is closely linked to his business capacities: in fact he has transformed the cultural activity in Giffoni into a cultural industry, offering permanent jobs to countless young people.

But over these 35 years, the Festival has not been the Director's only activity. In 1980, acting as a functionary of the Campania Regional Administration, he collaborated on numerous projects with the Council Departments of Tourism and Culture. He was subsequently nominated Responsible for Public Relations for the President of the Regional Council, an appointment he held until 1990. During his stay at the Regional Administration, he fought strenuously to sustain a Regional Law proposal for the foundation of the Campania Regional Cine-Library, finally seeing the law passed in 1982.

Gubitosi's "Neapolitan Period"

His “Neapolitan period” saw him committed for three years (1989 1991) to the San Carlo Theatre, where he organised numerous didactic and cultural activities destined for schools and local associations. With these initiatives of an almost desecrating character, Gubitosi transformed the theatre's “classic” audiences into a noisy theatre full of young people who were hearing the arias from Madame Butterfly for the first time in their lives, surprised and intimidated by the scenography and the power of the music.

From cinema to theatre to television, Gubitosi managed to impose the high quality films already presented at the Giffoni Film Festival on the palimpsests of both the national public and commercial television networks through his constant opera of “seduction”, thus bettering the relationship between television and young people.

In 1991 he was called upon by RAI (the national state-owned television network) to be a part of the UMBRIAFICTION TV team, the International Festival of Television Fiction. In 1992 he was nominated its Artistic Director. In two years UMBRIAFICTION TV received many signs of appreciation from all over the world, opening a section dedicated to television production for young people in the city of Terni. An event of extraordinary importance from which many new ideas in the field of television production for young people were born, ideas that generated effects that are still visible in the palimpsests of both public and commercial networks.

In the city of Salerno he realised another television project, ITALIAFICTION TV, which aimed to maintain constant the attention dedicated to television production for young people.He has collaborated with RAI, RTSI (the Swiss Television Company of the Italian Canton) and RAISAT. He had the idea for the Ragazzi al Cinema event broadcasted with great success on the Mediaset channels ITALIA 1 and CANALE 5.As an expert of the field he is a landmark for conventions and international meetings for the promotion and diffusion of productions destined or suitable for young people.

Involvement in the Giffoni Film Festival

However, the commitment that has marked 35 of his life is the Giffoni Film Festival, the heart of all his activities and projects.

In the eighties Gubitosi began to feel the necessity for a profound change that would notably amplify the event's perspective. The Festival needed a permanent home, new buildings to house its theatres and offices; and from this consideration the project for the Citadel of Cinema of Giffoni was born, a project that the Director was to follow tenaciously for years, always on the warpath in order to obtain the financing necessary to realise his new dream.The nineties were marked not only by the laying of the cornerstone of the first part of the Citadel, but also by the Festival's metamorphosis into a centre for cultural production, active throughout the year through high quality didactic and entertainment initiatives.

The new century brought the inauguration of the Citadel of Cinema, a 700-seat cinema and the offices that are the Festival's permanent home. Construction is already underway on the campus that will house the students who come to Giffoni from all over the world to study cinema . All this will become part of the wider project, the Giffoni Multimedia Valley, which will contain the “Witnesses of Time” cinema museum, the Campania Regional Cine-Library, an Imax cinema, a 400-bed hotel and restaurant and, in the not too far-off future, studios for the production of high quality cinema and TV for children and young people.

Other evidence of strong emotion and love towards the Giffoni Film Festival by Gubitosi dates back to the year 2003. The Maestro Carlo Rambaldi donated most of his wonderful creations to the Director: unique pieces, of immense cultural, historical and economical value (prototype of E.T., the mechanical arm of King Kong, etc.). The whole patrimony was given to the Giffoni Film Festival. On 17 June 2004 he became a member of the AIP (Audiovisual Industry Promotion), a new company of Cinecittà Holding. His prime duty is to promote Italian Cinema worldwide.

On 29 October 2004 he is nominated by the Minister for Art and Culture a member of the National Committee for Cinema.