Antonio Monda
Antonio Monda (born 19 October 1962) is an Italian writer, film director, journalist, and professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He is a well-connected figure in and promoter of the arts, particularly film and literature.
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[edit] Family and early life
Monda was born in Rome into a family of liberal Catholic politicians, and currently remains a practicing Catholic himself. His father, who died of a heart attack when Monda was 15, was mayor of Cisterna di Latina, a city south to Rome, and helped finance films, including some by the Taviani brothers, who employed the young Monda in 1981. His brother Andrea, is also a writer, and has published several books on Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Chesterton. Monda's uncle, Riccardo Misasi, then Minister of Education, was investigated for ties to the Mafia in 1993. The charges were dropped before the trial, but this caused the end of his political career. His reputation was restored when an avenue was dedicated to his honor in his hometown. What happened to his uncle, Monda has called "the greatest pain of my life, after my father’s death". This ultimately made him less fond of the Italian justice system and made it more difficult to pursue a career in Italy.
Monda earned a law degree at the University of Rome La Sapienza. In 1994, he moved to New York City where, in exchange for an apartment on the Upper East Side, he worked as a superintendent, and began writing for La Repubblica as well as teaching at NYU. Susan Sontag, whom he interviewed, wrote a letter of support to help him gain tenure. From 1999 on, he also worked for various Italian government cultural outlets.
In an interview with the New York Times, Monda stated “I was the worst super in the world".
[edit] Books
Antonio Monda started as an essayist and film critic. His first book on American cinema, La Magnifica Illusione (The Magnificent Illusion) won the Efebo d'Oro as the best film book of 2003. His book "Do You Believe?" was translated into several languagues. After his debut in fiction with the very well received "Assoluzione" which was originally published in Italy in 2008. In December 2010, Monda's latest work "Conversations with Ennio Morricone" will be released. He currently is preparing a new novel set in American in the 1950s.
[edit] Film
Monda has directed documentaries, commercials, and a feature film, Dicembre, presented at the Venice Film Festival winner of such prizes as the Carro d'Oro, Premio Cinema Giovane, Icaro d'Oro, and Premio Navicella.
[edit] Criticism & Journalism
He was a film critic for both the New York Review of Books and La Rivista dei Libri. After eight years with the daily newspaper Il Mattino, he became the US cultural correspondent for La Repubblica. He writes a column in the Italian Vanity Fair titled "Central Park West".
[edit] Interviews
Monda's interviews for La Repubblica have gained a status all their own; he is known for asking deeply profound questions in a very direct manner, such as "Comment on Dostoyevsky’s assertion that 'If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted'." This style caught the attention of director Wes Anderson, who cast Monda as himself in the film The Life Aquatic and included a parody—a DVD extra called "Mondo Monda" in which Monda asks such questions of Anderson and his associate, co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach, to befuddled reactions. Monda often manages to use his interview connections for book topics, classroom speaker series, or social gatherings.
His interviews with, among others: Saul Bellow, Jonathan Franzen, Nathan Englander, Toni Morrison, and Elie Wiesel appear in his book Do You Believe? Conversations on God and Religion.[1]
[edit] Salons and festivals
Monda is also famous for his writers' and artists' salons in his Upper West Side, Manhattan apartment, where Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Don DeLillo, Bernardo Bertolucci, Derek Walcott, Paul Auster, Martin Scorsese, Philip Roth, Jonathan Lethem and Arthur Miller have mingled. Even more star-studded is his literary festival Le Conversazioni, held on the island of Capri. A promoter of Italian-American cultural relations, he is a champion of anglophone writers in Italy and, according to the New York Times, a "one-man Italian cultural institute". The paper also referred to him as "the most well-connected cultural figure you've never heard of".[2]
He is the co-host, with Mario Sesti, of Viaggio nel Cinema Americano (A Journey into American Cinema) a series of public interviews at the Rome Auditorium with major film personalities such as Tim Burton, Spike Lee, Joel and Ethan Coen, David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Connery, Jane Fonda, Susan Sarandon and Sydney Pollack. Terrence Malick made his first and only public appearance here in October 2007.
He has curated shows for the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, the American Museum of the Moving Image, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He is on the Advisory Board of the Rome Film Festival.
He is also the co-founder of "Open Roads: New Italian Cinema" and Le Conversazioni.
[edit] List of Books
- La Magnifica Illusione 2003 (published by Fazi Editore updated and extended in 2007)
- The Hidden God (published by MoMA) (2004)
- Do you Believe? Conversations on God and Religion (2007) (published by Vintage)
- Assoluzione (published by Mondadori in 2008)
- Hanno preferito le tenebre. Dodici storie del male, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 2010 ISBN 9788804564799
