56 Factory

In the business, they call me Nencio. I first looked at the world from the hills of Florence, where I was born. That’s how I discovered the beauty of a landscape when the sun pops in from the right angles and understood the meaning of balance and ease in pictures. I then moved to Venice and learned its theater of manners while listening to dialogues along the walls of its alleys where everything is mirrored, and amplified, by water. When I landed in New York City in the 1970s, everything seemed suddenly bigger and stronger and filled my personality with a broader approach. A bunch of Photographers used to hang out at home with my father, a journalist for the italian edition of Life Magazine and I believe that was the time when I started dreaming of telling stories through still and moving images. In the 80s I attended a Photojournalism Course held by Leonard Freed from Magnum Photos and graduated from the Filmmaking Program at New York University. When I headed back to Milan, where I now live, I started working as a Location Scout at Politecne Cinematografica where I met Director Massimo Magrì and became his Assistant for the following decade. My other experiences as a 1st A.D. include surviving Tony Kaye and a number of international directors who were hired to shoot TV commercials in Italy at the time. After attending Judith Weston’s Class on “Directing Actors” at the Binger Film Institute in Amsterdam, I started my own career as a Commercial Film Director in 1996. Three years later I was awarded a Bronze Lion at Cannes Advertising Film Festival for a Swatch commercial. “I Non Luoghi”, my black and white book on NonPlaces, was awarded the First Absolute Prize at Orvieto Foto Festival in 2005 and started my parallel career as a Photographer leading me to a number of publications and exhibitions around Europe from then on. With the growing demand of Video contents, I founded 56 FACTORY my personal boutique for Creative Media Production.