Paolo Taviani, a movie director who worked in inseparable tandem with his brother to create some of the most lauded works in modern Italian film, among them “Padre Padrone” and “The Night of the Shooting Stars,” died Feb. 29 at a hospital in Rome. He was 92.
Vittorio, born in 1929, and Paolo, who followed in 1931, grew up in a small Tuscan town, San Miniato, where they had few opportunities to see films beyond “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and other animated Disney features.
“There on the screen was everything that had happened to all of us just a few months before,” Vittorio Taviani told the New York Times in 1986, speaking, as both brothers often did, for the two of them. “Seeing it unreel before us was glorious and tragic, and we realized at once that film was the one means we had to understand our own reality.”
