“His tenderness, his partisanship, his aesthetic extremism (so lively and arbitrary) enchanted and irritated me: the same feelings I had felt with Don Quixote or the sublime Johannes of Ordet”. That is how Giuseppe Bertolucci defined Gianni Amico (1933-1990), a free and independent voice of Italian cinema. Director, screenwriter (Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione and Partner, Glauber Rocha’s Der Leone Have Sept Cabeças), producer (Rossellini’s Era notte a Roma), organizer (of the Latin American film festival Rassegna del Cinema Latinoamericano). In love with Brazil, where he shot his first feature-length film (Tropici, 1968), he was assistant director to Jean-Luc Godard – who dedicated the chapter on Italian film in Histoire(s) du cinéma to Amico – for Le Vent d’est. Starting with his debut short film Noi insistiamo!, many of his works are marked by his passion for jazz. His last unfinished project was a film about Django Reinhardt written with Jean-Louis Comolli and Enzo Ungari. “‘True life is elsewhere’, wrote Rimbaud. Gianni Amico was ‘elsewhere’, where Django gave history the slip”.  (Comolli).