Giorgio Parisi — The 2021 Nobel Physics Prize Portrait, Rome

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For Swedish public television's flagship science programme Vetenskapens värld, I was the cinematographer on the portrait of Giorgio Parisi, one of the three 2021 Nobel laureates in Physics. The programme profiled all three laureates, and I shot the Parisi portrait — the film's final section, filmed across Rome, where he lives and works. It was directed by SVT journalist Ulrika Engström and broadcast by SVT.

The brief was a portrait rather than a lecture: to show not only what Parisi had discovered but who he is, and where his rare ability to find order in chaos comes from. That meant filming him in his own city and environment, alongside the colleagues who know him best.

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Concept and Narrative

The Parisi section is built around a single idea his friends and colleagues keep returning to — that he can find order in chaos — and it lets him explain his own Nobel-winning work in his own terms.

 

On camera he describes his discovery through an unexpected metaphor, a Shakespearean tragedy of shifting allegiances, using it to make the physics of spin glass and disordered systems legible to a general audience. His colleague Angelo Vulpiani, a theoretical physicist at Sapienza University of Rome, appears to describe the man behind the mathematics. My work was to film these ideas and these people so that a Swedish audience with no background in physics could follow a difficult subject and, more than that, warm to the person explaining it.

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Visual Language

A portrait of a thinker is difficult to film, because the subject is internal. My approach was observational and unhurried, letting Parisi be seen rather than performed. I filmed him explaining chaotic systems, moving between the abstract and the everyday — the tap of a rhythm, the impurity in a gold ring — and I filmed him away from the science entirely, in Rome's botanical garden, where the film closes on him led by the same curiosity that drives his work.

I lit the interviews for presence and clarity and kept the observational footage natural, so the ideas and the man hold together as one piece. The final image, a Nobel laureate at ease in a Roman garden, is the note the whole portrait builds toward.

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Production

This was a Rome shoot for a Swedish broadcaster, working to Ulrika Engström's direction across several locations — Sapienza University, interview settings with Parisi and his colleagues, and the botanical garden.

The priority throughout was a calm atmosphere in which people who are not performers, a physicist and his fellow academics, could speak naturally and be filmed without strain, and in which complex science could be captured clearly enough to carry an international broadcast audience. Filming a public figure in Rome also meant working discreetly around the attention Parisi attracts, capturing genuine moments as they occurred rather than staging them.

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Impact

The Parisi portrait completed SVT Vetenskapens värld's profile of the 2021 Nobel laureates in Physics. It gave a Swedish audience an intimate view of a scientist who had become a household name in Italy, and it did so by trusting observation and clear visual storytelling over lecture — letting Parisi's own explanations, his colleagues and his ordinary presence in Rome make the case for his brilliance. As a piece of cinematography it is the kind of work I value most: bringing a cinematic sensibility to serious ideas, and filming remarkable people in a way that feels true to who they are.

You can read SVT's own companion piece on the portrait here, and see more of my work in my other case studies.