Draft:Gianluca Neri

Gianluca Neri is an Italian film producer, television writer, radio host, and blogger.

Biography
He collaborated with the satirical weekly magazine Cuore and, together with the designer Roberto Grassilli, subsequently founded and curated the internet portal Clarence, which was later sold to Spray. and later passed to Lycos and Dada. He collaborates with various monthly magazines and manages Macchianera, a multi-author blog.

From 2003 to 2019, he organized the Festa della Rete (formerly known as Blogfest), a gathering of internet users held over three days after summer. After the first editions in Riva del Garda, the event moved to Rimini in 2013 and to Perugia in 2018. During the event, the Macchianera Italian Awards (MIA) were awarded each year, recognizing the best websites and blogs on the Italian web. The MIA award ceremony was presented over the years by Neri alongside various hosts, including Selvaggia Lucarelli, Francesca Barberini, Andrea Delogu, Ema Stokholma, Margherita Zanatta, Diana Del Bufalo, Claudia Alfonso, and Gianluca Gazzoli . On 20 December 2013, at the Vatican, during the ceremony following the Wednesday general audience, he handed Pope Francis the award for "Person of the Year".

With his production company Quarantadue, he produced the docuseries SanPa: Sins of the Savior (2020, as showrunner and writer) and The Yara Gambirasio Case: Beyond Reasonable Doubt (2024, as showrunner, writer, and director) for Netflix.

Film and Television
He was a television writer for Camera Café for Magnolia. For Giorgio Gori's production company, he managed a creative laboratory that developed new formats.

In July 2017, following some news released during the appeal trial of Massimo Bossetti, the weekly Oggi revealed that Neri was working on a documentary about the case of the murder of Yara Gambirasio. He would first produce a documentary about the history of the San Patrignano community and its founder, Vincenzo Muccioli.

On 14 February 2019, he founded the production company Quarantadue with four other partners in Milan. The company aims to develop, write, and produce television series or films (scripted and unscripted) for major broadcasters and streaming platforms.

SanPa: Sins of the Savior
On 30 December 2020, following an extensive advertising campaign in the Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Fatto Quotidiano, and on television before and after the Rai and Sky TG24 newscasts, the first Italian docuseries on Netflix was released, in which Neri debuted as creator, writer, and producer with his Quarantadue: SanPa: Sins of the Savior.

Through testimonies and archival footage, the 5-episode docuseries tells the controversial story of the San Patrignano rehabilitation community founded by Vincenzo Muccioli in 1978 in Coriano, in the province of Rimini. The docuseries was produced using 180 hours of interviews and footage from 51 different archival sources, 26% of which came from the Rai archives, to reconstruct the story factually and accurately. Besides Neri, the series was written by Carlo Gabardini and Paolo Bernardelli. The direction was by Cosima Spender, the editing supervision by Valerio Bonelli, the music by Eduardo Aram, and the cinematography by Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos.

Nastro D’Argento 2021 for documentaries, special award
On 10 March 2021, the National Syndicate of Italian Film Journalists (SNGCI) announced the award of a special prize at the Silver Ribbons 2021 to the documentary SanPa: Sins of the Savior, explaining that "it is an unusual choice, out of selection, as the Silver Ribbon regulations currently provide that awards are given exclusively to films, not serials, and a theatrical release has been a priority until now. However, since we pay close attention to 'cinema of the real', we decided to overcome the issue of 'format' because we could not forget in our palmarès an in-depth and documented investigation like the one we witnessed". The official motivation for the award was as follows: "In the lights and shadows of San Patrignano, narrated based on accurate documentation and now consigned to history, there is the sense and substance of a controversial story that has nevertheless marked an epochal transition in the history of a time already distant, with many wounds still open. The re-reading of a unique experience, loved and hated, contested and at the same time precious for the life and recovery of hundreds of girls and boys, reignites a spotlight on the broken generation that SanPa narrates and on the chronicles of those difficult years."

The Yara Gambirasio Case: Beyond Reasonable Doubt
The show In Onda on La7, hosted by Luca Telese and Marianna Aprile, announced that on 16 July 2024, the five episodes of the docuseries The Yara Gambirasio Case: Beyond Reasonable Doubt would debut on Netflix, with Neri as producer, director, and writer. The official trailer revealed that the series includes an interview for the first time with Massimo Bossetti, who was definitively convicted for the murder of thirteen-year-old Yara Gambirasio. Among the interviewees is also his wife Marita Comi, who - among other things - recounts the moment when she heard the news on the television about the arrest of Yara Gambirasio's killer, before discovering that it was her husband.

Development
The work on the series began in 2017, with a documentation phase by Neri that lasted several years. In 2021, the team of writers (Gianluca Neri, Carlo Gabardini and Elena Grillone) was assembled, and the writing room started outlining the structure of the docuseries. Before going into production, the writers thoroughly studied all 60 folders of the investigation documents (60,000 pages plus hundreds of gigabytes of images, audio, and video). Thousands of hours of video material were reviewed and then integrated into the narrative, synthesized into 118 minutes of footage recovered from twenty different archives.

Production
He created and directed The Yara Gambirasio Case: Beyond Reasonable Doubt, making his directorial debut. Neri also served as executive producer alongside Massimo Rocchi and Marco Tosi. The writers were Carlo Gabardini, Gianluca Neri, and Elena Grillone, who collaborated with Alessandro Casati, Cristina Gobbetti, and Camilla Paternò. The cinematography was done by Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos and Stefano Grilli, while the editing was done by Davide Molla, Alessandro Pelegatta, Nicola Quarta, and Riccardo Ramazzotti. .

Radio
He founded Macchiaradio (also known for some time as RadioNation). This famous Italian web radio began broadcasting on 21 April 2004, hosting over time various personalities from the world of radio and the Italian web, including Marco Ardemagni, Violetta Bellocchio, Matteo Bordone, Luca Bizzarri, Federico Bernocchi, Michele Boroni, Matteo Caccia, Francesco Cataldo, Andrea Delogu, Lorenzo De Marinis, Filippo Facci, Carlo Gabardini, Paolo Madeddu, Marisa Passera, Simona Siri, Luca Sofri, Filippo Solibello, Guia Soncini, Simone Tolomelli, and Laura Carcano.

From June to September 2008, during the Beijing Olympics, he conceived and hosted (together with LaLaura) the daily show Scatole Cinesi, broadcast on Rai Radio 2.

For the same station, he hosted the daily program Condor in December 2008 and the summer variant Kondor, il Condor con la cappa from June to September 2009, alongside Cinzia Spanò.

From July 2014 to June 2015, he conceived and hosted Share with Daniela Collu, broadcast on Rai Radio 2 on Saturdays and Sundays at 6 pm.

Calipari Case
On 1 May 2005, he appeared in the press as the blogger who - with a simple copy and paste from a PDF - revealed the redacted sections in the official U.S. document released after the investigation into the murder of Italian agent Nicola Calipari.

Canalis-Clooney Trial
In September 2015, a trial began involving him, along with Guia Soncini and Selvaggia Lucarelli, with charges of unauthorized interception, possession, and dissemination of access codes, unauthorized access to an IT system, violation of privacy, all aggravated by the attempt to gain profit. At the center of the investigation was the alleged access to the emails of showgirl Federica Fontana and photos taken at the George Clooney's villa on Lake Como during the 2010 birthday party of showgirl Elisabetta Canalis. According to the prosecution's reconstruction, these images were the focus of an attempted sale to the weekly Chi by Alfonso Signorini.

Dismissal and Acquittal
On 17 July 2017, Judge Stefano Corbetta of the 11th criminal section of the Milan court acquitted Selvaggia Lucarelli, Guia Soncini, and Gianluca Neri by reclassifying the allegations of unauthorized access to an IT system, illegal interception of communications, and violation of correspondence and declaring the dismissal for "not having to proceed". For the other two charges, including the alleged attempted sale of the Clooney and Canalis photos and the unlawful processing of personal data, the three were fully acquitted because "the fact does not exist"

Yara Gambirasio Case
In July 2017, he discovered the existence of a satellite photo taken by the WorldView-1 satellite on 24 January 2011, during the period between the day of Yara Gambirasio's disappearance on 26 November 2010 in Brembate di Sopra and the day her lifeless body was found in a fallow field in Chignolo D'Isola on 26 February 2011. Neri discovered the photo during the production of Unknown1, an 8-episode documentary on the murder case of Yara Gambirasio filmed in English, and since the girl's body does not seem to appear in the photo, he handed the image over to the defense team of Massimo Bossetti, sentenced to life imprisonment in the first instance for the crime in question, led by lawyers Claudio Salvagni, Paolo Camporini and coordinated by Roberto Bianco.

Neri agreed with the defense not to distribute the image to the press until it was discussed in court. The WorldView-1 satellite photo has a minimum ground resolution of 46 cm per pixel, which sparked debate among experts, divided between those who believe it is sufficient to determine the presence or absence of the body in the field and those who consider the photo's resolution too low. Starting from the second hearing of the appeal trial at the Court of Brescia on 6 July 2017, Neri attended the trial from the defense benches.

Only after Neri's discovery did the Bergamo prosecutor's office, which led the investigations into the case, reveal that they had been in possession of the photo for some time but had not included it in the investigation files. Lawyer Claudio Salvagni told the weekly Oggi that this choice aimed solely to prevent the defense from seeing it. Bossetti's defenders also claim to have repeatedly asked public prosecutor Letizia Ruggeri if there were satellite photos of the Chignolo D'Isola field during the period between Yara's disappearance and the discovery of the body and to have always received an official negative response.

Books

 * In 2004, a long story by him titled Nessuno mi può giudicare was published by Einaudi in the anthology La notte dei blogger.
 * In June 2010, his debut novel, Il grande elenco telefonico della Terra e pianeti limitrofi (Giove escluso), was published by BUR - Rizzoli 24/7.