Career
Two years later, his film El Otro Cristóbal was entered into the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. He appears in Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and in Marker’s Immemory Civil Defense-Rom. He wrote China (1956) for Marker’s Petite Planète collection and traveled with Marker in the making of Letter from Siberia (1957), which inspired his book Siberia — Zero + Infinity the following year.
According to his 1989 biographer, Dorothy Knowles, Gatti was born in 1924 in a shantytown in Monaco to Auguste Rainier an Italian anarchist from Piedmont, who escaped murder in a Chicago slaughterhouse because of his political activities and fled Benito Mussolini’s regime and to Letizia Luzona a maid.
During World World War II, Gatti joined a small French resistance maquis. Captured, tortured, and sentenced to a concentration camp in Hamburg where he was forced to work in a diving bell at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, Gatti eventually escaped and joined a British Special Air Service special forces team
After the war, he worked as an award-winning journalist for many years until he traveled with Marker, published his first plays, and directed his first film, Enclosure (L’Enclos, 1961). L’Enclos was screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival but it was hailed by Truffaut, Resnais, Cocteau and others