Luca Guadagnino
With “Call Me by Your Name” he made one of the most celebrated gay love stories in film – and later filmed Burroughs’ “Queer”.
Luca Guadagnino was born in Palermo, the son of an Algerian mother and a Sicilian father. He spent his early childhood in Ethiopia, where his father taught, until the family returned to Palermo in 1977. At nine he got a Super 8 camera and began making films. He studied literature and film history in Palermo and Rome and wrote his thesis on Jonathan Demme.
His first feature, “The Protagonists” (1999), began a long collaboration with the actress Tilda Swinton. With “I Am Love” (2009), “A Bigger Splash” (2015) and “Call Me by Your Name” (2017) he completed what he called his “Desire trilogy”. “Call Me by Your Name”, based on André Aciman’s novel, tells of the summer love between a 17-year-old and an older student in northern Italy in 1983. The film was celebrated worldwide, received four Oscar nominations, including best picture, and won the Oscar for James Ivory’s screenplay.
Guadagnino, who is openly gay, has also made the horror remake “Suspiria” (2018), the HBO series “We Are Who We Are” (2020) about queer teenagers on a US military base in Italy, the cannibal love story “Bones and All” (2022), which won him the Silver Lion in Venice, and the tennis drama “Challengers” (2024). In 2024 he released “Queer”, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel about an American in Mexico City consumed by his desire for a younger man.
He is known for lush images, emotional intensity and eroticism, and also directs documentaries and fashion films.