The Lost Legacy of Tony Gaudio
Italian Contest – Feature Film
Synopsis:
In 1906 Gaetano “Tony” Gaudio, a young man from Calabria, set out for the American Dream. Under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he quickly strengthened his passion for cinematography. Its roots were in his family’s photography studio in Cosenza and had become his profession in Turin while Italian cinema was developing. He then contributed to the founding of Hollywood, where his revolutionary talent was consecrated in 1937 with an Academy Award, the first in history for an Italian. Today, that statuette is missing. Seventy-five years later, his descendants in Los Angeles and a detective begin the search for that precious award, piecing together the fascinating life of Tony Gaudio in the hope of reclaiming the lost legacy.
DIrector’s Notes:
From the very beginning, I felt that the fascinating and little-known story of Tony Gaudio could become not only the biography of a successful Calabrian emigrant but also a vehicle for themes that are very close to my heart: the journey, both towards the unknown and the return, and the search: for the statuette, the origins of cinema and one’s family, and Italian-American identity. Given the scarcity of documents, I experimented with a narrative construction in which documentary and fiction alternate differently from classic reenactment.