Gianni Minà(1938-2023)

One of the most esteemed RAI correspondents for over fifty years, Gianni paints the stories of North and South America's social realities and customs using moving pictures. He produced and directed a History of Jazz, History of Central and South American Music, as well as History of Boxing, all seminal anthologies. In 1981, Italy's President Pertini awarded Gianni the Saint Vincent Prize for the best TV journalist of the year. From 1981 to 1984 he was the author and host of Blitz, a very successful Italian TV show, which hosted one-thousand-four-hundred guests from all over the world. Gianni interviewed icons like Federico Fellini, Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Gabriel García Márquez, Enzo Ferrari and Eduardo De Filippo to name a few. In 1987, Minà produced a historic documentary, interviewing Cuba's President Fidel Castro for 16 hours. Three years later, in 1990, he interviewed Fidel again for a report on the end of communism. He later published two books based on these reports. Minà also wrote for Sperling & Kupfer Ed.: Marcos e l'insurrezione zapatista (Marcos and the Zapatist Insurrection), Un continente desaparecido (A lost Continent), Il Papa e Fidel (The Pope and Fidel), Storie (Stories), Un mondo migliore è possibile (A better world is possible). Some of his best known documentary films: Muhammad Ali, una storia americana (Muhammad Ali, an American story); Marcos: aquí estamos (Marcos: Here we are), dealing with the long march of the Zapatists through Mexico; Rigoberta Menchù, una donna maya per la pace (Rigoberta Menchù, a Mayan woman for peace); Diego Maradona: non sarò mai un uomo comune (Diego Maradona: I'll never be a common man); and C'era una volta il cinema: Sergio Leone e i suoi film (Once upon a time there was cinema: Sergio Leone and his films), a unique production with the participation, among others, of Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro, Claudia Cardinale and Ennio Morricone. Between 1996 and 1998 Minà produced and directed the TV program, Storie (Stories), in which he interviewed such luminaries as the Dalai-Lama, Jorge Amado, John John Kennedy, Martin Scorsese, Isabella Rossellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Luis Sepúlveda. In 2004, he produced and directed, with Surffilm, Traveling with Che Guevara, which won the Golden Zénith for Best Documentary at the Montreal World Film Festival and also won at the Festival of Valladolid. In 2007 he produced and directed, with Rai Trade and Gazzetta dello Sport, Maradona: I'll never be a common man, the history of the Argentinian soccer player in ten episodes. The series garnered record DVD sales in Italy. In the same year, Gianni Minà was awarded the Berlinale Kamera for the ensemble of his career at the 57th Berlin Festival, the prize honouring his series of six documentaries titled "Cuban Memories", which was also presented at the Seville film Festival. His latest feature length documentary: "Pope Francis, Cuba and Fidel" recounts how four of the most influential religious and political leaders of the world (Pope Francis, Obama, Fidel and Raul Castro) come to Cuba and brainstorm on ways to lift the senseless and antiquated American embargo. His most recent book, "Il Mio Ali" (My Ali) was published last year in Italy. It contains a collection of articles Gianni wrote about Muhammad Ali. They were closest friends.