Stefano Savona was born in Palermo in 1969. After studying archaeology and anthropology in Rome and Cambridge and working as an independent photographer in 1997 he started producing and directing documentaries and video installations. His first feature length documentary, Notes from a Kurdish Rebel, produced in 2006 by Arte France, gained the International Jury Prize at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris. His intimate chronicle of the 2008 war in Gaza, Cast Lead, obtained the Special Jury Price at the Locarno Film Festival 2009. In the same year he launched a campaign for the gathering of the filmed testimonies to be included into Il Pane di San Giuseppe, a visual archive for the preservation and the transmission of the oral history of rural civilization in Sicily counting to date around 200 hours of edited contributions. In 2010 he founded with Penelope Bortoluzzi Picofilms, a company with which he has been producing all his subsequent films. Among these Palazzo delle Aquile, awarded with the Grand Prix du Cinéma du Réel in 2011 and included in the Acid selection at Cannes Film Festival 2011, and Tahrir Liberation Square that, after its premieres in Locarno and at New York Film Festival was theatrically released in France and won the David di Donatello and the Silver Ribbon for best documentary in Italy.