Since his childhood, Angelo Cianci has been fantasizing about South America, “an idyllic, faraway, inaccessible place” where he goes every year. He has travelled throughout the continent, from Mexico to Chile, and even acted as a tour guide when he was a humanities student.

However, this passion has never provided him with even one of his many screenwriting ideas. That’s because, paradoxically, Cianci draws inspiration from himself on several accounts: “Like the characters in my stories, I want to be invisible and recognized at the same time,” he says. Such ambiguity encouraged him to burrow into the lives of executioners, the guillotine operators who disappeared along with the killing machine in the late 1970s. “Last year in Drouot, the sale of Anatole Deibler’s private notebooks piqued my curiosity. I wanted to know more about these men whose occupation was handed down from father to son.” Reviewing documents and biographies from the period, he launched into long-term historical research before developing a saga for television. And no matter if this time he’s not the director: “I like to write as much as I like to handle the camera; what I enjoy about each is simply different,” he says.

Having been trained on film sets and at the Conservatoire Européen d’Ecriture Audiovisuelle, a French screenwriting school, Cianci may have come to moving images by way of literature and the humanities, but it’s certainly on the small screen that he intends to win acclaim.

Achievements since winning the grant

In 2005 he prepared a short film as part of  La Collection for Canal +.

Hautes oeuvres, his project, is in the process of being funded by Pampa Productions