Profiles: Franco Lolli | Proimágenes Colombia

Franco Lolli was born in Bogota in 1983. He studied film in France, first at the Paul Valéry and Sorbonne Nouvelle universities, and then in the directing department at La Fémis.
 
Lolli’s career as a director began with his graduation film, Como todo el mundo (2007), a short film selected in more than 50 international festivals -- San Sebastián, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, and others -- where it picked up a total of 26 awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand, Angers, Brussels, R.I.H.L. Poitiers, and Expresión en Corto festivals. His second short film, Rodri (2012), premiered at the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2012; since then it has participated in several international festivals, winning 13 awards. Lolli's experience in the field also includes his work alongside Jacques Toulemonde Vidal with the script Un juego de niños (2011), directed by Toulemonde Vidal.
 
In 2007, Lolli traveled to Cambodia to co-direct the documentary Memory and Images, a Cambodian Experience (Mémoire et images, une expérience cambodgienne) in collaboration with local filmmaker Rithy Panh. The documentary aimed to highlight the importance of images as a key component of memory, given the difficulties in explaining all of the procedures involved in protecting film or audiovisual archives. The directors decided to take an extreme situation such as Cambodia, where the archives were destroyed or scattered, in order to explain that memory without images is an incomplete memory, making a country fragile.
 
In 2014 he released his debut film, Gente de bien, which recounts the reunion of a father and son who have never lived together. Eric is 10 years old and his father, Gabriel, faces a difficult economic situation, prompting him to work as a carpenter in the house of María Isabel, a wealthy woman from the capital. María Isabel decides to help them, but when she takes the boy under her wing, she fails to fully understand the consequences of her actions.
 
Gente de bien had its worldwide premiere during the Critics' Week at Cannes in 2014 and at the Lima International Film Festival, where it won in the Official Competition. It also received the Best Film Award at the 41st Film Fest Gent in Belgium; the Best Actors Award at the La Orquídea Film Festival in Cuenca, Ecuador; the Special Jury Prize (debut film category) at the Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba; the award for Best Picture by a Latin American Director 35 years or younger at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival in Argentina; and a special mention in the Horizontes Latinos section at the 62nd San Sebastián Festival in Spain.
 
Gente de bien has been selected in more than 40 international festivals, and was recently on the lineup in the Fiction Official Competition and the Colombian Film Official Competition at the 55th edition of the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI), where it was screened for the first time in Colombia. Lolli also served as one of the jurors in the New Creators category at the Cartagena festival. 
 
Aside from his work as a director, in 2011 Lolli founded his own film production company, Evidencia Films, with the goal of producing in Colombia both his own projects as a director and works by other Colombian filmmakers. Aside from Gente de bien, Lolli’s company produced Colombian filmmaker and artist Laura Huertas Millán’s short film La Música, winner of the Film Development Fund, set to premiere in late 2015.