Alessandro Genovesi, the Italian director who built a career on other people’s hits

Alessandro Genovesi

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 10, 1973 Milan, Italy
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Tearsmith, When Mom Is Away, The Worst Week of My Life

Most of the films Alessandro Genovesi has directed started life as someone else’s idea: a BBC sitcom, an off-Broadway play, an Argentine family comedy, a François Ozon murder mystery, a French body-swap farce, a novel first posted chapter by chapter on Wattpad. The odd part is that he came to cinema as an author. His way in was a stage comedy he wrote himself, and the screen career that followed has made him one of the safest box-office bets in Italian comedy while leaving critics unsure what he wants to say with it.

He came up through the theatre in his native Milan rather than through film school. He worked first as an actor, in productions led by directors such as Luca Ronconi, Elio De Capitani and Carlo Cecchi, and only later began writing and staging his own plays.

The turning point was Happy Family, a comedy he wrote and directed that opened at the Teatro dell’Elfo in 2007, when he was 34. Its game with characters who seem to know they are being written owes an open debt to Pirandello. The play won prizes and caught the attention of Gabriele Salvatores, who turned it into a film in 2010, with Genovesi co-writing the screenplay and working as assistant director. The film, with Fabio De Luigi as a screenwriter afraid of happy endings, competed for the Nastro d’Argento for best comedy.

De Luigi followed him into his own directing debut, La peggior settimana della mia vita, in 2011. Loosely based on the BBC sitcom The Worst Week of My Life, it paired De Luigi with Cristiana Capotondi as a couple whose wedding week goes wrong in every possible way, and it did well enough to earn a Christmas sequel, Il peggior Natale della mia vita, a year later. Soap Opera, a New Year’s Eve ensemble piece set in a single apartment building, opened the Rome Film Festival in 2014. Ma che bella sorpresa, with Claudio Bisio and Frank Matano, followed in 2015.

The film that fixed his commercial profile arrived in 2018. Puoi baciare lo sposo, adapted from Anthony J. Wilkinson’s off-Broadway play My Big Gay Italian Wedding, follows a gay couple planning their wedding in the hilltop village of Civita di Bagnoregio, with Cristiano Caccamo, Salvatore Esposito, Monica Guerritore and Diego Abatantuono as a progressive mayor who is far less progressive about his own son. Genovesi has explained that the script had to be reworked during its long development, because Italy approved civil unions in the meantime. The film took more than two million euros in Italy.

A year later came 10 giorni senza mamma, his remake of Ariel Winograd’s Argentine comedy Mamá se fue de viaje, which leaves De Luigi alone with the children while his wife takes a break. Three weeks after release it was still at the top of the Italian box office, with close to six million euros. It turned into a series: 10 giorni con Babbo Natale in 2020, with Abatantuono as Santa Claus, and 10 giorni con i suoi in 2025.

In 2021 he took on Ozon’s 8 femmes, itself drawn from a play by Robert Thomas, and recast it as 7 donne e un mistero, a 1930s Christmas whodunit with Margherita Buy, Sabrina Impacciatore, Micaela Ramazzotti, Luisa Ranieri, Benedetta Porcaroli, Diana Del Bufalo and Ornella Vanoni. The same year he co-created Ridatemi mia moglie for Sky, an Italian version of the BBC series I Want My Wife Back, again with De Luigi in the lead.

Then came the project that carried him beyond the Italian market. The Tearsmith, released by Netflix in April 2024, adapts Erin Doom’s novel, one of the best-selling books in Italy in 2022. Genovesi co-wrote the script with Eleonora Fiorini and cast two young leads, Caterina Ferioli and Simone Baldasseroni, as orphans adopted by the same family. It became the first Italian film to reach number one on Netflix’s global chart for non-English films and held the spot for two weeks.

That success sharpened the question that has followed him since Happy Family. The playwright who broke through with an original, self-aware comedy has spent most of his screen career translating proven formats, and reviewers tend to treat him as a capable technician of other people’s material. The Tearsmith opened on Rotten Tomatoes with a score of zero from a handful of critics, most of them put off by a plot that piles one catastrophe on another. Silvio Danese wrote in MYmovies that Puoi baciare lo sposo, meant to expose Italian hypocrisy over civil unions, ends up staging a war of intolerance instead. Genovesi’s answer at the time was that he was making a film, not a law. The audience figures mostly back him, and that gap between the box office and the reviews is the most consistent thing in his filmography.

His most recent release tested that pattern. Una famiglia sottosopra, a remake of the French comedy Le sens de la famille, has Luca Argentero, Valentina Lodovini and their children waking up in each other’s bodies after a night at Gardaland. Pulled from its original December 2024 date, it reached Italian cinemas through Eagle Pictures in November 2025, drew poor reviews and took around half a million euros. Away from his own sets, Genovesi keeps turning up in small parts in films very different from his: a carabiniere in Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice, a ticket inspector in her La chimera.

His next film is La notte delle fragole, a romantic comedy starring the Sicilian duo Ficarra e Picone alongside Anna Foglietta, Vittoria Puccini and Giulia Fiume, about forced cohabitation and feelings nobody has resolved. Shooting began in June 2026, and Medusa Film opens it in Italian cinemas on 26 November.

Featured Films

Tags: Cristiano Caccamo, Alessandro Genovesi, The Tearsmith, 10 giorni senza mamma, Fabio De Luigi, Gabriele Salvatores

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