The Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto invites you revisit the work of one of the leading figures of Italian film culture during the years straddling the Second World War.
Join professor Alberto Zambenedetti, Director of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, as he presents his latest work
Francesco Pasinetti: Soggetti e sceneggiature | Book Launch
Tuesday April 14, 2026 | 6:30 pm ET
Istituto Italiano di Cultura
496 Huron Street | Toronto
Free event – Registration required
To register on Eventbrite click here
This critical edition of Francesco Pasinetti’s scenarios and screenplays, most of which previously unpublished, offers readers a way to explore his ideas about documentary and fiction film. The prolific author, director, critic, and scholar was able to complete only one feature film during his short life, Il Canale degli Angeli (1934), but his documentaries (some of which are lost) offer glimpse of the full extent of Pasinetti’s extraordinary creative output. That richness can only be grasped by delving into what survives of his vast archive, which includes letters, photographs, poems, and the fifteen unmade film projects collected and annotated in this volume. This edition brings together the writings preserved in the Fondo Francesco Pasinetti at the Archivio Carlo Montanaro in Venice, filling a long‑standing gap in scholarship on the great Venetian artist. It invites readers to imagine, through Pasinetti’s own words, the cinema he might have created—one that, regrettably, never came to be.
FRANCESCO PASINETTI (1911–1949) was one of the leading figures of Italian film culture during the years straddling the Second World War. The first person in Italy to earn a university degree with a thesis on film history, he was a critic, historian, teacher, promoter, screenwriter, director, documentarian, and producer — a true total filmmaker. From his university years to his tenure as director of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Pasinetti published articles, books, and manuals, and he influenced the careers of Alida Valli, Michelangelo Antonioni, Francesco Maselli, and Glauco Pellegrini. He completed only one feature film, Il Canale degli Angeli (1934), along with a handful of remarkable documentaries, among which the incomparable masterpiece Venezia minore (1942) stands out.
ABOUT THE PANELIST
Alberto Zambenedetti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, and he is serving as Director of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. His latest book is a critical edition of Francesco Pasinetti’s unpublished scenarios and screenplays: Francesco Pasinetti. Soggetti e sceneggiature (Marsilio Editori, 2026). He is the author of Acting Across Borders: Mobility and Identity in Italian Cinema (2021), and the editor of World Film Locations: Florence (2014) and World Film Locations: Cleveland (2016). He also co-edited Federico Fellini. Riprese, riletture, (re)visioni (2016) and Federico Fellini: Centenary Essays (2025). He contributed essays to the home video releases of Fire at Sea (Gianfranco Rosi), Dawson City: Frozen Time (Bill Morrison), and Fellini’s Casanova (Federico Fellini).