Sergio Leone was born in 1929 into a cinematic family: his father was director Roberto Roberti and his mother silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi. Leone dropped out of college at 18 to pursue his own film career, working with Vittorio de Sica on The Bicycle Thief (1948) and afterwards building his own career on popular historical films. In the 1960s, he pioneered a Hollywood-European (and even Asian) hybrid, the “Spaghetti Western”, which combined the myth and ambience of an aging American classic with European staffs and sensibilities, Spanish landscapes, Asian and other art models and a mélange of actors and languages. While over 600 spaghetti westerns appeared by the 1980s, Leone’s works became particularly influential for their artistry and striking, almost operatic tales, embodied in the “Dollars Trilogy” with Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name and its distinctive themes by Ennio Morricone. Spaghetti westerns, in particular, changed the nature of heroism, using antiheroes or pairs of heroes of very different backgrounds and interweaving violence and motives of money and revenge that undercut the noble myth of the cowboy. Although the genre waned in a spate of comedies in the 1970s, they still influence American directors who have rethought the Western, including Eastwood himself (Hang ‘Em High, 1968) and Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, 2012). In the 1970s, working with larger stars and budgets, Leone took on more and more ambitious global projects, whether tackling an encounter of the IRA and Mexican revolutionaries (Once Upon A time in the Revolution) or bringing the renewed Western back home to Hollywood in Once Upon A Time in the West, a film chopped by fearful Hollywood studios (perhaps affirming Leone’s sense of the problems of the Western). Passing on the opportunity to direct The Godfather (1972), Leone made his culminating project the big-screen, all-star vehicle Once Upon a Time in America (1984), to be screened in the 39th HKIFF. Nonetheless, it also faced problems from the studio. Hence, despite dreams of other projects, Leone never completed another film before dying at age 60. Decades later, though, his powerful visions of film and the myths of America have been recognized masterful cinema and tremendous entertainmentInfo: http://bit.ly/ZBLqT2Programme and screening scheduleA Fistful of DollarsFor a Few Dollars MoreThe Good, the Bad and the UglyOnce Upon a Time in the WestOnce Upon a Time in the Revolution