Istituto Luce Cinecittà

Company Biography

Istituto Luce was founded in 1924 as a stock company, and then Benito Mussolini through a Royal Decree ruled it as non-profit "moral institution" governed by public law.

In July 1925 the Presidency of the Council of Ministers sent out a circular to the Ministers of Interior, Education, Economy and Colonies asking them to use exclusively Istituto Luce for their educational and propaganda purposes. In 1927 it created the newsreel Giornale Luce, intended to be screened in all Italian cinemas before the screening of their films. In 1935, the Istituto Luce established the Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche (ENIC), a branch dealing with film production: one of the first films produced was the 1937 blockbuster Scipio Africanus: The Defeat of Hannibal by Carmine Gallone. In 1936 the Institute ceased to depend directly on the prime minister and went under the MinCulPop.

After the war the company continued to engage in production of numerous documentaries and films (directed, among others, by Pupi Avati, Marco Bellocchio, Claude Chabrol, Liliana Cavani, Mario Monicelli, Ermanno Olmi, and Ettore Scola). In 2009 the company was merged with Cinecittà Holding SpA, setting up a joint stock company: Cinecittà Luce SpA, which in 2011 was renamed Istituto Luce Cinecittà. Filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson have worked at Cinecittà. More than 3,000 movies have been filmed there, of which 90 received an Academy Award nomination and 47 of these won it. Actually Istituto Luce Cinecittà is considered as the oldest public institution devoted to production and distribution of cinematographic materials for didactic and informative purposes in the world, with over 30,000 movies in its archives.

The Challenge

We need to replace an old Thunderbolt 2 DAS with a Thunderbolt ™ 3 solution that can be able also to share data among film restorers using different MacOS workstations.