Italian movie director Paolo Taviani, 92

Paolo Taviani, a movie director who worked in inseparable tandem with his brother to create some of the most lauded works in modern Italian film, among them “Padre Padrone” and “The Night of the Shooting Stars,” died Feb. 29 at a hospital in Rome. He was 92.

The cause was pulmonary edema, said his son, Ermanno Taviani.

Paolo and Vittorio Taviani co-directed more than 20 movies together in a career that lasted more than half a century. They were not the only celebrated sibling duo in the industry; in the United States, Joel and Ethan Coen made films including “Fargo” (1996) and “No Country for Old Men” (2007), and Lana and Lilly Wachowski gave audiences “The Matrix” (1999).

But among connoisseurs of international cinema, the film critic Terrence Rafferty once observed, the Tavianis were known as “the greatest cinematic brother act since Louis and Auguste Lumière,” the Frenchmen who in 1895 invented the cinématographe and made one of the first motion pictures.

Vittorio, born in 1929, and Paolo, who followed two years later, grew up in a small Tuscan town, San Miniato, where they had few opportunities to see films beyond “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and other animated Disney features.

The sons of an anti-fascist lawyer, they lost their home in a German attack during World War II and were living in Pisa when they saw “Paisà,” director Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 drama depicting the Allied liberation of Italy in the searingly spare style called neorealism.

“There on the screen was everything that had happened to all of us just a few months before,” Vittorio Taviani told the New York Times in 1986, speaking, as both brothers often did, for the two of them. “Seeing it unreel before us was glorious and tragic, and we realized at once that film was the one means we had to understand our own reality.”

Neorealism, which prevailed in Italian cinema in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was in essence the opposite of escapism, projecting on the screen the deprivations endured by the Italian population after the war.

Deeply influenced by the social and political commitments of neorealism, the Taviani brothers added to it a poetic style all their own.

“They charted a very important path in postwar Italian cinema,” said Millicent Marcus, a professor of Italian studies and film studies at Yale University, counting the brothers among the filmmakers who “elaborated on the neorealist premise of making films that matter.”

Among their best known works was “Padre Padrone” (1977), translated in English as “My Father, My Master,” which received the Palme d’Or, the top prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival in France.