If I were forced to tell Marco’s story, I might call it The Man with the Golden Eye – an attempt to capture his genius, his talent, his invisible rhythm.

Enrico Ghezzi

A revolutionary and brilliant cinéphile, from the late 1960s until the early 1990s, Marco Melani worked at different times as a director, screenwriter, editor, a festival programmer for some of the era’s most daring film festivals, a television writer (Schegge, Blob, Fuori orario) and a film critic. A powerful and charismatic speaker, he lived and breathed cinema by building bridges and forging connections: between directors from all over the world, between filmmakers and actors – the pairing of Roberto Benigni and Jim Jarmusch is one example – between critics and filmmakers, between audiences and auteurs. His eye had the uncannily quick ability to recognise true value. He explored new films and revisited classical cinema with a gaze that was always original, unpredictable and illuminating. For him, one of the last incarnations of the critic was that of the detective: someone who observes and questions, himself included. Insatiably drawn to ideas, films, friends, and “a drug not called Julie”, despite his imposing physicality, Melani left behind an underground trace – little noticed yet deeply charged with his presence. Like a karst river, he reshaped the cultural landscape without drawing attention to himself. Traces of his influence can still be found today in certain forms of television production, in some film festivals, and in ways of thinking about, making and watching cinema. Over the course of fifteen years, Chiara Seghetto assembled a remarkable collection of testimonies from friends and colleagues – in Melani’s case, professional and personal life were deeply intertwined – together with extensive material from RAI and private archives, shaping it into a richly polyphonic narrative. Figures such as Tonino De Bernardi, Marco Giusti, Otar Iosseliani, Enrico Ghezzi, Adriano Aprà, Piero Spila, Roberto Silvestri, Fiorella Amico, Francesca Archibugi, Enrico Rava, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Amos Gitai, Angelo Guglielmi, Sergio Grmek Germani, Roberto Turigliatto, Ciro Giorgini, Chema Prado and Clare Peploe come together to offer vivid, moving and deeply engaging fragments of the figure that was Marco Melani.