Born in
Castelfiorentino, near
Florence, he founded at the high school an innovative film club, which proposes and critically analyzes
neorealism movies; since then he showed a character of "novelty", often considered as "subversive". He graduated from the
University of Florence with a thesis on the "New Italian Cinema", Ferrara then moved to Rome to attend the directing course at the
Experimental Centre of Cinematography and degreed in 1959, but hardly managed to find interesting opportunities, also because of his rather transparent political opinions. He continued, despite many difficulties and impediments, especially related to finance and production, his activities as a documentary and short filmmaker. After shooting several documentaries in the 1960s, he began making fictional films in the mid 1970s. His most famous film is
The Moro Affair (1986), which was awarded with the
Silver Bear for Best Actor for
Gian Maria Volonté at the
37th Berlin International Film Festival. His 1995 film
State Secret was entered into the
19th Moscow International Film Festival. He taught "Science and Technologies of Artistic Productions" at the
University of Perugia. Ferrara died of cardiac arrest on 25 June 2016, a few days before his 84th birthday. ==Selected filmography==