With deep sadness, we announce the death of Guido Santi, creator with his wife, Tina Mascara, of the prize-winning documentary film Chris & Don: A Love Story.
Passionate, intuitive, gentle, determined, Guido looked for meaning in the observation of real life, finding through his camera lens a storyline that was both true and compelling. He was an obsessive recorder, accumulating enough footage to permit him to narrate with conviction and using his sophisticated sensibility with masterful restraint. His curiosity was benevolent—never predatory, never judgmental—but persistent and profound. So, after long courtship, his subjects always yielded their inmost secrets. The subjects were unconventional, the secrets arresting and inspiring. He asked in varied ways the questions we ourselves might like to ask, had we been watching as closely and thinking as hard as he was. He got down to the nerve, to the heart of things.
Guido’s best work was done in collaboration with his wife, Tina; among his greatest achievements was to recognize and nourish in her the filmmaking genius which was the perfect complement to his own. Together they made another prize-winning film, Monk with a Camera, and the company they founded, Asphalt Stars, is currently in production on The Muslim Other and Don Bachardy: License to Look.
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Guido Santi, born Genoa, Italy, May 9, 1962; died Los Angeles, California, February 4, 2019.
In Italy, he earned a B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, at the Università degli Studi di Urbino. He apprenticed with Ipotesi Cinema, a film laboratory coordinated by Cannes and Venice award-winning director Ermanno Olmi (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs), and then worked for Italy's national TV, RAI, producing and directing hundreds of reports about technology, entertainment and social issues. At RAI, he also produced and directed his first documentary biographies, about Luciano Pavarotti and about the Academy Award-winning director, Vittoria De Sica (The Bicycle Thief), and he wrote and directed Concertino, produced by Monica Vitti and Leo Benvenuti, about four teenagers living in the suburbs of Rome.
In Los Angeles, he earned an M.A. in Film and Television Production at USC, where he won a Tom Bush Scholarship Award for Excellence in Cinematography and a Phi Beta Kappa International Distinguished Student Scholarship Award. Later, he won a Pendleton Research and Production Grant. He produced and directed many more documentaries and TV specials about illegal immigration, gangs in Los Angeles, 9/11, and other topical subjects.
He was an assistant professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at Ithaca College in New York State, and he taught at USC, the Studio School, UCLA Extension and Columbia College, Hollywood, in Los Angeles, as well as contributing as a guest artist at workshops and seminars around the world. Since 2002, he lectured in Film Aesthetics and History of Cinema and taught Cinematography and Directing at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, California, where he was Professor and Co-Chair of the Cinema Department at the time of his death.
Chris & Don: A Love Story premiered at the Telluride Film festival in 2008. It won best documentary at the Miami LGBT Festival, the Spokane Film Festival, and the Sulmona International Film Festival, and it was nominated for best documentary by the Gotham Film Award and GLAAD Media Award. zeitgeistfilms.com/film/chrisanddon
Available on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/movie/chris-don-a-love-story/id563966412
Monk with a Camera (2013) won Best Feature at the 2017 Rishikesh Art and Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in 2014. monkwithacamera.com
Guido was on the Board of Directors of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.
College of the Canyons Professor Guido Santi Remembered by His Colleagues
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