Saverio Costanzo
Saverio Costanzo was born in Rome on 28 september 1975. He graduated in Sociology of Communication with a thesis on Italian Americans in Brooklyn.
He moved to New York where he made a documentary in episodes on daily life at an Italian Brooklyn cafe. Caffè Milleluci was the first Italian example of an Internet docu-soap. In 2000 Costanzo wrote, directed and edited 6 episodes of a new docu-drama set in the emergency intensive care unit of Rome’s Umberto I University Hospital. The series, entitled Sala Rossa, won him the Jury Special Mention Award at the Turin Film Festival.
Private was his first full-length feature film. It won the 2004 Pardo d’Oro Award and the Award for Best Leading Actor at the Locarno International Film Festival and was sold in over 25 countries.
In the summer of 2006 he made his second full-length feature, In Memory of Me, filmed on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The movie was selected in competition at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival.
2010 was the year of his third full-length feature, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, based on the novel of the same name by Paolo Giordano, which sold over two million copies in Italy alone and has been translated into over thirty languages. The film was in competition at the 67th Venice Film Festival. In 2014 he directed Hungry Hearts, starring Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver. The film was in competition at the Venice Film Festival, winning two Volpi Cups for Best Leading Actor and Best Leading Actress. Costanzo directed the first, second and third seasons of the Italian version In Treatment, the HBO series based on the Israeli format created by Hagai Levi.
In August Saverio Costanzo will be on the set of My Brilliant Friend, an eight-episode series based on the first book in the best-selling tetralogy by Elena Ferrante.