Italian film director Francesco Rosi dies at 92

Respected Italian film director Francesco Rosi died in Rome on Saturday at 92, local media said.

His film Hands Over the City, a story of political corruption in post-World War II Italy, was winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1963.

The Mattei Affair, depicting the life of a businessman who developed the nascent Italian oil and hydrocarbon industry, won the Golden Palm at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

With his film Salvatore Giuliano, the biography of a Sicilian bandit, Rosi won the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1962.

"Doing cinema means making a moral commitment with your conscience and with spectators," the director said expressing his idea of cinema when he had the Lifetime Achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 2012.

Among several other awards, in 2008 Rosi also received the Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement in Berlin.

Born in southern art city Naples, Rosi had his start assisting master Luchino Visconti on The Earth Trembles in 1947 and later other major directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Mario Monicelli.

He made his debut as a director in 1958 with The Challenge, a film inspired by the story of a boss of Camorra, one of Italy's mafia-style crime syndicates, based in Naples.

In 1960s, Rosi became best known as one of the central figures of post-neorealist Italian cinema, with his films appearing to always have political messages.

His topics were less politically oriented in 1970s, when Rosi presented more conventional pictures of corruption in Italy, and by the 1980s, when he became more angled toward literature. Rosi continued to direct until 1997. Endit