Vittorio De Seta was born in Palermo on October 15, 1923. Since 1953 he has been working as assistant director to Mario Chiaro and Jean Paul Le Chanois. Afterwards he produced and directed many short films, mostly in his home country in Sicily. On most of those films he also worked as cinematographer and editor as well (Lu tempu de li pisci spata, 1954, Isole di fuoco, 1955, and Pescherecci, 1959). During his stay on Sardinia he made his first feature film Banditi a Orgosolo (1960) for which he won the award as best debutant in Venice in 1961. For some time he worked in France and in 1972 returned to Italy and made the TV film Diario di un maestro, based on Albino Bernardi’s autobiographical novel Un anno a Pietralat. It is a story about the hard life of an elementary school teacher on the outskirts of Rome. After a long break, in 1993 De Seta directed the documentary In Calabria. In April of 2005, Museum of Modern Art in New York organized the screening of his film Banditi a Orgosolo.