Niccolò Palomba

Selected Works

Cinema About Cinema

La macchina delle immagini di Alfredo C.

La macchina delle immagini di Alfredo C. (The Image Machine of Alfredo C.)

Director
Roland Sejko
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2021

A film about the material memory of cinema, narrated entirely in voiceover. Film was a necessity: without it, the narration risked staying distant from the wonderful archival footage. I chose Super 16mm to warm the images with the organic quality of film and make grain a vehicle of memory. The wartime archive is sharp and deep — very low-sensitivity stock, great depth of field, highly defined; against it, the smaller format, soft lenses, half-shadows and visible grain give the footage shot on set the texture of recollection.

La macchina delle immagini di Alfredo C.
La macchina delle immagini di Alfredo C.

Awards & selections

  • Orizzonti Extra — 78th Venice International Film Festival
  • Nastro d’Argento — Best Documentary Film
  • David di Donatello finalist (final ten) — Best Documentary

Links

La nostra magnifica ossessione — Bernardo Bertolucci e la sua generazione

La nostra magnifica ossessione — Bernardo Bertolucci e la sua generazione (Our Magnificent Obsession — Bernardo Bertolucci and His Generation)

Director
Marco Spagnoli
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2025

A portrait of Bertolucci and his generation. For the scenes with Stefania Sandrelli — a dreamlike set rebuilt on a soundstage, taking her back to her years with him — I looked for a light recalling a famous shot from The Conformist, then corrupted it with a film projector throwing the film’s images onto the props: a bridge, made in-camera, between archive, extracts and my own footage. The camera moves are at the service of the editing.

La nostra magnifica ossessione — Bernardo Bertolucci e la sua generazione

Links

Paramount Pictures e l’Italia

Paramount Pictures e l’Italia (Paramount Pictures and Italy)

Director
Marco Spagnoli
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2017

A chapter in the relationship between Hollywood and Italian cinema — jet set, productions, glamour. The blue that has always dominated the Paramount logo gave me the key: cold tones and high-key photography close to pictorial Chiarismo — light, luminous tones, almost no chiaroscuro, light and colour fused into form, thinning the weight of volumes in the frame. I wanted a light that evoked that affluent world without turning the film promotional or elegiac.

Paramount Pictures e l’Italia

Awards & selections

  • David di Donatello finalist (final five) — Best Documentary

Links

Lucherini ne ho fatte di tutti i colori

Lucherini ne ho fatte di tutti i colori

Director
Marco Spagnoli
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2014

A portrait of Enrico Lucherini, the inventor of Italian film gossip. The title itself is the photographic manifesto — literally ‘all the colours’. I alternated scenes with light and depth that kept the realism and spontaneity of the moment with others where the tones warm or cool, taking on different casts and contrasts. I kept changing lens sets and cameras, to carry across the showmanship of the man and his life.

Awards & selections

  • Special Nastro d’Argento
  • David di Donatello finalist (final five) — Best Documentary

Links

Franco Battiato — La voce del padrone

Franco Battiato — La voce del padrone

Director
Marco Spagnoli
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2023

A documentary on Franco Battiato and his album ‘La voce del padrone’, the first Italian album to pass a million copies. For the testimonies I chose cold, detached tones, set against the archive material in which Battiato often speaks for himself: the coldness separates those who talk about him from the man talking about himself. I shot the well-known faces who remember him on a set, under a slightly desaturated light.

Franco Battiato — La voce del padrone

Awards & selections

  • Nastro d’Argento — Best Documentary, entertainment category (ex aequo)

Links

Il Coraggio del Leone

Il Coraggio del Leone

Director
Marco Spagnoli
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2021

The 77th Venice Film Festival, in the COVID year: the only major festival held in person. To carry the mood of the moment I worked largely handheld, moving to the Steadicam where the account rose to the festival’s grandeur. The festival’s tie with Campari, among the film’s sponsors, let me use deep reds and light whole scenes in the brand’s red. I showed Venice in dark, romantic tones, to draw it out of the shadows at night, among the water and its canals.

Il Coraggio del Leone
Il Coraggio del Leone

Links

A pugni chiusi

A pugni chiusi

Director
Pierpaolo De Sanctis
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2016

A portrait of Lou Castel — the face of Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, an icon of Italy’s cinema of dissent — built as a long stream of memory and improvisation through a Rome suspended between post-industrial archaeology and Pasolinian ruins. I shot him in a single, always-crepuscular light. With De Sanctis we gave Lou complete freedom to express himself as he saw fit, and the camera follows him, seeking the right distance and the tension between his performance and our wish to hold it sharp on screen. For his performance, Lou Castel received the Nastro d’Argento as performer of the year.

A pugni chiusi
A pugni chiusi

Awards & selections

  • Torino Film Festival — Italiana.doc

Links

Documentary Voices

Scherza con i fanti

Scherza con i fanti

Director
Gianfranco Pannone
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2019

A journey through Italy’s history built around the reading of old diaries. On the places I filmed I looked for sharp contrasts and deep blacks, to press into them the personality and mood of those who had written those diaries. Where the account turns from historical record to intimate, contemporary testimony, the depth of field narrows, the edge of the image softens and the colour turns warm.

Scherza con i fanti

Awards & selections

  • Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days) — Venice 76
  • Best Documentary — Italian Film Festival of Madrid
  • CICT-UNESCO “Enrico Fulchignoni” Special Jury Prize

Links

Fiction

Amen

Amen

Director
Andrea Baroni
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2023
Production
TNM Produzioni
Distribution
Fandango

Three sisters grow up in a farmhouse closed off from the world, under a despotic grandmother. I built that separation with light: inside, dark, soft tones that wrap the characters in both light and shadow; the outside enters as a crushing, forbidden glare that stirs their curiosity. Even outdoors a dense, hard light keeps them inside the family’s closed world. Here light works as set and costume: it gives the place and the mood of the protagonists.

Amen
Amen

Awards & selections

  • Torino Film Festival 2023 — Out of Competition (Premio Interfedi)

Links

L’Insonne – Ouverture

L’Insonne – Ouverture

Director
Alessandro Giordani
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2016

Adapted from the cult comic L’Insonne: an esoteric thriller with a protagonist suspended between waking and sleep. To pull the image toward the comic panel I chose saturated tones and hard-edged shadows, and moved the camera for the dynamism a comic gets from a few drawings. Shadows and lens flares blur the line between what the lens renders sharp and what stays less legible: where the story holds no doubt the image is clear, where doubt fills the protagonist it becomes harder to read.

L’Insonne – Ouverture

Awards & selections

  • Fantafestival 2017 — in competition

Links

Personal Work

Mariuschenka

Mariuschenka

Director
Niccolò Palomba
Director of Photography
Niccolò Palomba
Year
2021
Production
Cinecittà

A portrait of photographer Caio Mario Garrubba through the voice of his wife Alla Folomietova. I didn’t want to exhibit his photographs but to restore an intimate dialogue: I chose an informal, seemingly improvised look, setting each subject in a place that belongs to it. I filmed the prints physically, so archive and new footage run without a break; hard contrasts, deep blacks and grain pull the image toward the reportage photography of those years — raw, imperfect, and for that reason alive.

Mariuschenka
Mariuschenka

Awards & selections

  • Best Cinematography — Liverpool Indie Awards
  • Best Short Documentary — Dubai Independent Film Festival
  • Asolo Art Film Festival
  • Buenos Aires International Film Festival

Links

The selected works are fragments of an ongoing inquiry into images, memory and the technologies used to preserve them.