our history

Otello Pagliai Produzioni was founded in 1939 in Florence, Italy.

“The nicest rebel I ever met; a rebel who did not know the meaning of envy, but was always ready to react against injustice so truth could triumph”.
This is how Saverio Becocci, Florentine publisher, spoke of Otello Pagliai, theatre and cinema author, born in Florence on October 28, 1909.

A man predestined to show business, in love with the theatre but even more so with the cinema, a milieu he got involved in when he was just fifteen and a half, having convinced his parents to enrol him in the Florence cinema school.
Here he shot his first short film, “La morsa”, set in Villa Favard. It was a short step from there to Rome, capital of Italy and of the Cinema.

His stay in the city of the Caesars saw him employed for a long time as art consultant for Venus Film and author of films himself. In 1943, he wrote the script for “Sant’Elena piccola isola – Saint Helena Small Island” (directed by Simoni and Scarpelli), where a very young Alberto Sordi was one of the actors.

Back in Florence in the late 1940s, he returned to his first idea, working on a project to create a “new city of the Cinema” in the Sant’Angelo a Lecore district of the town of Campi Bisenzio. The project was highly ambitious and involved numerous professionals who strongly believed that a film industry intending to produce in Italy would find it helpful to be able to use top quality equipment in state-of-the-art film studios. The press began to spread the word, and the dream of having new local film studios infected everybody in Florence.

Otello Pagliai’s dream and his love of the cinema had the great merit of keeping attention focused on Florence and its role as the hub of the film and audiovisual industry in Italy.