Before videomaking there was writing. Antonio started as moderator in a forum
about an acclaimed Video Game, Grand Theft Auto; the website was GTA-Series,
now one of the most comprehensive sources about the franchise on YouTube.
Watching films and play video games has been something he did throughout his
life, since he was a very young child. Football was another strong passion, surpassed
by the aforementioned ones by the time he was fourteen or so.
The urge of writing about stuff he was so interested in stemmed from the desire to
share his views on the things he used to follow so religiously. At a certain point, this
subsequent activity became so important and decisive that, in order to gain the
maximum pleasure from the games he was playing, the films he was watching or
even the books he was reading, for that matter, writing about them was simply
necessary.
A few years later, in 2008, through another forum, someone gave him the chance to
make a job out of his passion for writing. This is when Antonio initiated his
collaboration with Blogo, the company behind Gamesblog, which lasted until 2013.
Meanwhile, in 2010, Blogo offered him to write for Cineblog, one of the main
thematic websites in Italy. At that point Antonio had the opportunity to discuss in
depth two areas that were very close to him, Video Games and Cinema.
His need to scrutinize all the products and works he had to write about naturally led
him to deepen his knowledge about the technical side of things. Out of mere
curiosity at the beginning, this was also the phase which convinced him it was
possible making a film even with few resources, providing one was both daring and
foolish enough to try.
So, after approximately a thousand reviews and many Festivals covered all over
Europe, he decided to leave the company he was working for and start almost anew.
The amount of hours spent on studying the subjects he had to write about, while not
being enough (one can never study enough), led him nonetheless to take even more
seriously the idea of making films himself.
In 2020 he embarked on a journey that brought his first work of fiction in the form
of a medium-length feature. After a few years of fooling around with the idea, in a
not so comfortable period, so to speak, he decided it was the time to take a step
further and go make a film. Any film. For the location, he chose his hometown in
Sicily, Catania, even if logistically wasn’t the easiest choice – by that time, he had
been living in Milan for ten years.
With no script, very few money and just some images in his mind, during three
weeks of a hot Sicilian summer, thanks to the invaluable support of his wife and the
help of a bunch of people that he barely knew, Ginola was completed.
Two years later, in 2022, like a killer coming back to the scene of the crime, Antonio
filmed a short, again in Sicily. Same place, same main actor (Stefano Andretta) but
this time with a script loosely based on a short story written by Giovanni Papini.
The title is Il libro di Lello
