Neri Parenti

Neri Parenti (born 26 April 1950) is an Italian film director and writer.

He is known for comedy films, including the series starring Paolo Villaggio playing the character Ugo Fantozzi, and a later series of cinepanettoni—zany comedy films scheduled for release during the Christmas period.

After graduating in political science, he dedicated his career to filmmaking.

He became a pupil and assistant of Pasquale Festa Campanile from 1972 to 1979, and also worked for Salvatore Samperi, Steno and Giorgio Capitani.

In 1979 he directed his first film, The Face with Two Left Feet, an ironic and comical parody of Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta, which had been a hit two years earlier.

A year later he met the film actor and director Paolo Villaggio, who was then filming Fantozzi contro tutti.

Villaggio developed an esteem for Parenti and decided to leave the director's chair to join forces with him.

The result was very positive and the pair made another six films with the Fantozzi character, from Fantozzi subisce ancora (1983) to Fantozzi - Il ritorno (1996).

His films feature catastrophic and noisy gags, referring back to American silent film, combined with typical situations from Italian comedy (commedia brillante) and with some authorial motifs, repeated in almost all his films, from the diptych Scuola di ladri (1986) and Scuola di ladri - Parte seconda (1987), to the famous trilogy Le comiche (1990), Le comiche 2 (1992), and Le nuove comiche (1994).

His film Le comiche was the fourth-highest-grossing film in Italy in 1990.

Parenti had already experimented in this kind of movie when he was still working with Villaggio; the first such film he directed was Vacanze di Natale '95 (1995).

After the expiry of his contract with Villaggio in 1996, Parenti turned to directing Christmas movies, or cinepanettoni, starring Christian De Sica and Massimo Boldi.

Further films he made set at Christmas time started with Merry Christmas (2001), and ended with Vacanze di Natale a Cortina (2011), which registered the third highest takings in Italy that year.

The spokesman of the Holy See, Federico Lombardi, and Cardinal Velasio de Paolis, who from 2003 to 2008 was secretary of the Apostolic Signatura, both promptly denied the report, saying that the director was only joking.

Anyway, the director considers himself atheist.

Parenti claimed in 2012 that he had been excommunicated twice for sequences in Le comiche and Le comiche 2 that he said had been considered outrageous by the Catholic Church.

In 2020, he directed comedy couple Christian De Sica and Massimo Boldi in In vacanza su Marte, after a 15-years hiatus.

He is one of the few Italian directors to have stayed within a single genre throughout his career.