Mimmo Verdesca
Born 1979, Apulia (Italy). In 2002 he began working for film and television as an assistant for directors such as Maurizio Ponzi, Naydat Anzour, Fabio Grossi. In 2009 he shot the documentary THE EYE BEHIND THE CURTAIN, the making of the theatre show THE MAN, THE BEAST AND THE VIRTUE, written by Luigi Pirandello, and then he made the TV versions of the theatre shows Pirandello’s THE PLEASURES OF HONESTY and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s BEFORE THE SILENCE. In 2011 he directed the documentary LILIA SILVI, AS AN ARTIST, which won the Silver Ribbon 2012 for best documentary on the cinema.

Director’s statement
“In the documentary FOREVER STARS, I collected new testimonies from the most famous and symbolic child actors of the Italian cinema, from Neorealism to the present, the little stars of several feature film such as THE CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US, LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, THE EARTH WILL TREMBLE, TWO WOMEN, CINEMA PARADISO, SHOESHINE, THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO.

“If it is true that childhood is a crucial phase in the growing up, I wanted to tell what happened ‘after’ the participation of the actors in the feature films: not the period of the set, but its result, the way that special experience matured in their lives, affecting the course of lifetime, for better or for worse. Through the stories and the thoughts of these former child actors, I tried to bring out the emotions of yesterday and the awareness of today.

“Digging in their past, I wanted also to go into the outlook and the collective memory of a whole country that saw them ‘live’ in the fiction of cinema, providing a new proposal of knowledge, analysis and meditation”.