José Giovanni

Biography: life and films

José Giovanni (real name: Joseph Damiani) was a French film director and screenwriter. He was born in Paris, France on 22 June 1923 and died in Lausanne, Switzerland on 24 April 2004. Condemned to death in 1948 for his involvement in a gangland killing, Giovanni had his sentence commuted and was released from prison in 1956. He immediately embarked on a career as a writer, his first novel, Le Trou being an account of his unsuccessful prison escape. A few years later, this novel was made into a film by Jacques Becker, who hired Giovanni as a screenwriter. Giovanni also assisted on the film adaptations of his other novels - Classe tous risques, L'Excommunié and Le Deuxième Souffle - and began directing his own films in the late 1960s. His best film as a director is arguably Deux hommes dans la ville (1973), in which he put forward an eloquent case for the abolition of the death penalty in France.

Filmography