Liliana Cavani began her filmmaking career as documentarist for RAI; her debut film was Francesco d'Assisi (1966), acclaimed at the Venice Film Festival, followed by Galileo (1968). The Year of the Cannibals (1970), an adaptation of Sophocles's Antigone, raised moralists' eyebrows. Even more upsetting to the censors and the respectable were her next films The Night Porter (1974), a cult classic, and Francesco (1989), in the way she handled controversial such themes as racism, Nazism, guilt related to power and sexuality-subjects around which her films often center.
