«Today is a day of mourning for cinema and culture in Sardinia . Gianni Olla, film critic, cultural operator, brilliant intellectual with multiple interests has left us after a period of illness ». The announcement of Antioco Floris , professor of Cinema, Photography, Television at the University of Cagliari. A scholar of the seventh art who has always had the development of culture at heart, which he considered a factor of development and collective growth, has died at the age of 72 .

Gianni Olla lived and worked in Cagliari . He collaborated with the Sardinian Union. He has taught cinema history and criticism at the Universities of Cagliari and Sassari and has published essays and volumes on documentary cinema in Sardinia, on Chinese cinematography, the cinema of 1968, the Holocaust on screens, as well as on Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Pedro Almodovar, François Truffaut, Franco Solinas, Fiorenzo Serra, Grazia Deledda, Marcel Proust.

«Gianni - writes Antioco Floris - was a pioneer in promoting cinema in the pages of Sardinian newspapers and specialized periodicals in Italy, in books, but above all in the intense passion with which he followed cultural activities in the area. In my library I see the numerous volumes he has published over the years, opening up lines of research not yet observed before him». The mayor of Cagliari also recalls this: «Gianni Olla was a great film critic and a refined intellectual. He will be greatly missed by the world of culture » .

Thus Antonello Zanda , director of the Cineteca Sarda: «Gianni was a complete cultural operator: writer, critic, journalist and promoter of the cultural debate on cinema and beyond. Many projects have seen us together, from those promoted by the Cineteca to the Teorema magazine with which he has been constantly collaborating in recent years».