Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours of Life

A galaxy of cinema luminaries — from Ken Loach to Wim Wenders and Bernardo Bertolucci — pay tribute to the great Italian cinematographer Carlo Di Palma, in this loving documentary that chronicles Di Palma’s extraordinary work for such directors as Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen.

Over the history of cinema there have been some extraordinary cinematographers, but pre-eminent amongst their number is Carlo Di Palma. As this finely crafted tribute to Di Palma shows, his life and career ran even deeper than the contributions he made to cinema. A child of the Second World War, Di Palma emerged from Rome's rubble as a 20-year-old in 1945, and found himself in the magical moment of Italian neorealist cinema. His father was a camera operator; his mother sold flowers on the Spanish Steps, which, in his own estimation, gave him a natural sense of colour.

It was his innovations in colour with Antonioni's Red Desert and Blow-Up, in the mid-1960s, that set him apart as a genius of the medium. Director Fariborz Kamkari threads together stunning excerpts from the films with interviews. The result is a glorious celebration of a humanist and an engaged artist of uncommon talent.