Oscar-winning Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore, famous for films like “Cinema Paradiso” and “Ennio” is set to direct a new film called “The First Dollar”. It is a biopic of Bank of America founder Amedeo Peter (A.P.) Giannini who pioneered modern banking and supported Hollywood’s emerging film industry.
The film will be informed by documentary-based research developed at the University of Greenwich by Associate Professor Valentina Signorelli in collaboration with Dr Cecilia Zoppelletto, Visiting Professor at the Academie des Beaux Arts in Kinshasa, DRC, alongside other significant studies and sources.
Professor Signorelli and Professor Zoppellatto’s research has already led to the award-winning documentary "A.P. Giannini – Bank to the Future" (released in Italy as "Made in Dreams"), produced by Daitona and Preston Witman Productions.
Born into a family of Italian immigrants in San Jose, California, Giannini started the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904. That bank later became the Bank of America where he revolutionised modern-day banking through the introduction of practices such as branch banking and loan financing for everyday people.
He also supported the birth of Hollywood by creating a motion-picture loan division that backed that financed hundreds of films such as “West Side Story” and “Lawrence of Arabia”. It also provided a loan to finance Walt Disney’s “Snow White”. At $1.4m it was the biggest loan for a movie at the time and allowed for the production of the first animated feature in the US.
The project illustrates how university research can meaningfully influence global cultural production. As part of Italian-Heritage and Culture month in the USA, the A.P. Giannini – Bank to the Future documentary was screened in over 20 public events across the country. Dr Signorelli is also co-founder of the production house Daitona, and her films have been screened in more than 40 international film festivals, including the prestigious Venice Biennale.
