It won the Golden Lion at the 27th Venice Film Festival, and earned him Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

(1969), a period film about a fictional slave revolt in the Lesser Antilles; and Ogro (1979), a dramatization of the assassination of Spanish Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco by Basque separatists.

In 1938, faced with growing antisemitism in Italy with the rise of Fascists, he followed his elder brother Bruno to Paris, where he found work in journalism and as a tennis instructor.

He became an assistant to Joris Ivens, a Dutch documentary filmmaker and well-known Marxist, whose films include Regen and The Bridge.

In addition to these influences, Pontecorvo began meeting people who broadened his perspectives, among them artist Pablo Picasso, composer Igor Stravinsky and political thinker Jean-Paul Sartre.

[1] Pontecorvo broke ties with the Communist party in 1956 after the Soviet intervention to suppress the Hungarian uprising.

"[2] After the Second World War and his return to Italy, Pontecorvo decided to leave journalism for filmmaking, a shift that appears to have been developing for some time.

Pontecorvo spent months, and sometimes years, researching the material for his films in order to accurately represent the social situations he explored.

He focused primarily on the native Algerians, a disenfranchised population who were seldom featured in the general media.

The film has been used as a training video by revolutionary groups, as well as by military dictatorships dealing with guerrilla resistance (especially in the 1970s during Operation Condor).

Its influence can be seen in the few surviving works of West German filmmaker Teod Richter, made from the late 1960s up to his disappearance, and presumed death, in 1986.

In addition, more recent commercial American films, such as the Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and others draw from these techniques for less lofty purposes.

Pontecorvo continued his series of highly political films with Ogro (1979), which addresses the occurrence of Basque terrorism at the end of Francisco Franco's dwindling dictatorship in Spain.

[4] In an interview that Pontecorvo gave in 1991, when asked why he had directed so few feature films, his response was that he could only make one with which he is totally in love.