Sergio Basso

Sergio Basso is a film and theatre director, as well as a video game scriptwriter.

He alternates his film career with an academic one: he holds a Post-Doc in Classics, with a focus on ancient history and Greek-Byzantine philology.

He has lived in China on several occasions since 1996. It was in China that he worked as an assistant director and dialogue writer for Gianni Amelio on the set of the film La stella che non c’è.
He graduated in Directing from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He holds a three-year diploma in directing and acting with Jurij Alschitz, under the aegis of Gitis, the Moscow Academy of Dramatic Art.

He made his debut with “Amori elementari”, an Italian-Russian co-production exploring the emotional world of children. The film hit theaters in February 2014, and Basso simultaneously published the novel of the same name with the Salani publishing house.

In 2020, his second film, “Dimmi chi sono”, was released—a Bollywood-style musical shot in a refugee camp in Nepal, starring a fourteen-year-old refugee girl. It was distributed in cinemas in Italy, Germany, Canada, Poland, France, and the UK.

He writes regularly for La Lettura, the cultural supplement of Il Corriere della Sera.

Since 2005, he has also been writing series and film scripts for other directors.

He has shot numerous documentaries that have been awarded at major international festivals: Locarno, Annecy, Nyon, Beijing, Turin, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, and Toronto. He won the Best Sports Film Award at the Festival International du Film Sportif in 2013 (with “19 e 72”, about Pietro Mennea) and in 2015 (with “Amori elementari”).

He has written for RAI, both for fiction (“Marta&Eva”, 2021) and for prime-time documentaries (“Nel cuore della Cina”, “Cine tempestose”).

Among others, he has collaborated with the UN, OSCE, NOKIA, Il Corriere della Sera, TELECOM Italia, Save the Children, the Il Sole 24 Ore publishing house, SKIRA, the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Emilia Romagna, the University of Milan, Oxford University, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Scuola Holden.

He is a member of the European Documentary Network.
He received the 2008 grant for Young Italian Artists.
He is among the winners of the 2009 Premio Solinas.

He has taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and held masterclasses in various universities abroad, from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) to FAMU in Prague.

Since 2001, he has been the artistic director of the Teatraz Theatre Company. In theatre, he has worked with Pëtr Fomenko, Eimuntas Nekrosius, and Philippe Delaigue, among others.

He has dedicated himself to the development of various cross-media platforms with Il Corriere della Sera and to experimentation in the field of animation, winning at the Annecy Festival, the European Oscar for animation.

In 2014, he was invited to Beijing to shoot a prime-time documentary in Chinese for the state television CCTV 6, dedicated to the renaissance of the Han Dynasty in the 1st century AD.

The invitation was renewed in 2016: he shot a documentary for BeijingTV on the 80th anniversary of the Long March, winning the 2016 China Award.

His latest story is slated to be directed by Gabriele Mainetti, the director of “They Call Me Jeeg”.