Just watched a curious Sardinian crime film, Pelle di bandito, and decided to do a little bit of research into its director, Piero Livi. According to the IMDB, he was born in Olbia (Sardinia) on April 1st, 1925, and only directed four films:
1969: Pelle di bandito
1977: Dove volano i corvi d’argento
2001: Sos Laribiancos – I dimenticati
2004: Maria si
As well as acting as a production manager on Roberto Natale’s Il mio corpo con rabbia (72).
A little digging around, though, reveals that his career was a little more extensive than that. His connection with the cinema began in the late 1950s, when he helped establish the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema d’Amatore, which lasted for ten festivals before becoming the Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Indipendente, which lasted until 1974. He began his career as a director in 1957 with the short film Marco del mare, following it with several more shorts, including Visitazione (58), Il faro (61), Una storia sarda (62), I 60 di Berchiddeddu (65) and Il cerchio del silenzio (66). He also made documentaries, but little information is available about this side of his work.
His first full length feature Pelle di bandito, a vague retelling of the same events that also inspired Lizzani’s Barbagia, was shown at Venice, and it’s a fascinating tale of Sardinian banditry, told with a neo-realist’s attention to the details of everyday life and folk customs. But it was a long time until his next film, Dove volano i corvi d’argento (77), another Sardinian tale of blood feuds and vengeance. This was followed by an even longer gap until he released two films in the 2000s: Sos Laribiancos – I dimenticati (about a group of Sardinian soldiers fighting in the Russian campaign of the Second World War) and Maria sì (about a man suffering a mid life crisis).
Livi appears to be something of a big cheese in Sardinia, and Pelle di bandito definitely shows that he’s a filmmaker of interest, but he’s perhaps suffered because of his status as a Sardinian – as opposed to an Italian – filmmaker.