Paolo
Sorrentino

BAROQUE MELANCHOLY

FILM

Paolo Sorrentino is an Italian filmmaker born 1970 in Naples. At seventeen, both parents died from carbon monoxide poisoning while he was away at a football match—a tragedy that would surface three decades later in his semi-autobiographical film The Hand of God (2021). After studying economics, he turned to cinema, developing a visual language often compared to Fellini: sweeping camera movements, operatic compositions, and a satirical eye trained on power, decadence, and the search for meaning. His films including The Consequences of Love (2004), Il Divo (2008), and The Great Beauty (2013)—which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film—explore aging men confronting the emptiness beneath surfaces of wealth and influence. Sorrentino's work blurs the line between reality and dream, finding beauty in the baroque and the profane. His television series The Young Pope (2016) and The New Pope (2020) brought his aesthetic to long-form narrative. He lives and works between Rome and Naples.