Francesco Carrozzini

Francesco Carrozzini is an Italian director and photographer based in the United States, born in Monza in 1982 and raised in Milan; his mother was the late Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani. He moved to Los Angeles in 1999 to study film at UCLA. As a photographer he has shot portraits for magazines including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.

He has directed commercials and music videos for artists including Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Lenny Kravitz. His documentary Franca: Chaos and Creation, about his mother, premiered at Venice in 2016 and won a Nastro d'Argento, and his first narrative feature, The Hanging Sun, adapted from Jo Nesbø, closed the 2022 Venice festival. He also directed episodes of the Netflix series Supersex (2024).

Be Brave is his 90-minute documentary about Renzo Rosso, founder of Diesel and the OTB Group, produced by Mediawan's Our Films. It premiered out of competition in the Venice Open section of the 83rd Venice Film Festival in September 2026. Festival director Alberto Barbera called it the first Italian feature-length documentary made entirely with AI, saying even live-action footage was reworked with AI; the producers say they spent more than a year and a half building an AI image workflow, with creative control kept by the director and his team.

In his director's statement Carrozzini says the decision to use AI came from necessity rather than fascination with technology, and presents it as a mirror of Rosso's way of thinking. The festival material does not name the AI tools used.