Gianfranco Brebbia was born in Varese in 1923 and studied in Milan at the Salesian Milano School. From 1943 to 1945, he was interned in Switzerland, where he learned the tailoring trade, which he would practice after the war. It was from this Swiss experience that he drew the sensitivity to nature that is reflected in his works. He began practicing photography at a very early age. In 1962, he made his first film with a Bolex Paillard Reflex H8 camera, which would become his preferred format. Throughout his career, he documented the city of Varese and the artistic effervescence of the 1960s, as well as the construction boom that disfigured Varese's historic district. From the second half of the 1960s, Brebbia became a member of the Coopera di Roma. Among the worldwide flowering of experimental filmmaker groups that emerged in the 1960s as independent cooperatives, the Italian movement, sometimes self-named "underground," stands out for its originality and aesthetic diversity, as well as its imperviousness to any type of market and professionalization, those of art as well as industrial cinema. Founded in Naples in 1967 by Adamo Vergine, then quickly transferred to Rome, with the aim of collecting and distributing the films of Italian experimental and underground filmmakers, the Cooperativa Cinema Indipendente (1967-1971) brought together several figures, including Tonino De Bernardi, Pia Epremian De Silvestris, Massimo Bacigalupo, and Gianfranco Baruchello. In 1967, he shot "Amore in Antitesi" at the Campo dei Fiori in Varese. An antithesis between the profane love of young couples and the sacred love of cloistered nuns, this film was shot with a telephoto lens. Brebbia wrote about it: "All the scenes in this film were shot live, no images were artificially created, which is why the telephoto shots from a distance allowed the characters to move as if they were not being filmed by a movie camera." The same year "Polemizzando in Bianco e Nero" on the "building boom" (Boom edilizio), a period during which the buildings in the city center of Varese were destroyed. In 1968, Brebbia produced "So That’s That", at the Sacro Monte, in Varese, a place of Catholic worship and pilgrimage, composed of fourteen chapels located along a hill leading to the sanctuary of Santa Maria del Monte. 1968 will also be the year of "UFO", on the happening "Ufo. Flying objects" organized at Monte Olimpino in 1968 by the visual artist Bruno Munari and Daniela Palazzoli, then director of the magazine BIT. That same year, during the 2nd edition of the Rendez Vous Des Cinémas d'art et D’essai at the Palazzo dei Congressi of the Republic of San Marino, Brebbia presents "Extremity 2", which he describes as "cinematic experiments - incandescence, filtering sunlight - filming, through the window of a working projector, rotating geometric solids that reflect colored rays." In 1969, Brebbia produced "Anno 2000", a two-part film, a mix of sequences from the historic center of Varese, soon to give way to new residential areas and construction sites, in which he focuses his camera on the fleeting details of facial expressions, held for an extra second before disappearing, emphasizing reflections on the lives of the inhabitants in the year 2000. In the same year he composed a film from close-ups of the painter Sandro Uboldi, alternating with plays of light, "Deserto in Luce Solare", as well as a series of films, originally projected on a double screen, "Idea Assurda un Filmaker", of which Dominique Willoughby tells us, in Gianfranco Brebbia. The Rebel Amateur (2023): “The two side-by-side screens play on the contiguous surfaces of the two frames or windows, according to two spaces whose movements, colors, and figures act as sensual counterpoints of depths, shifts, and textures. The sting of the barbed wire rubs shoulders with the softness of the women’s landscape-faces fused with the iridescence of the water and the networks of branches and grass. The double-screen arrangement plays on the soft and the stinging, the near and the far, the detail and the landscape, the warm and cold colors, the shifts of surfaces and the deep advances of the zoom.” In his film "Fumus Art", he documents the "Opere di fumo" organized in Varese in 1969 by the artist Luciano Giaccari. In 1973, he made two films scratched on film and hand-colored with Indian ink, "Bet" and "Bazar." He died suddenly in Varese on January 7, 1974, at the age of fifty, leaving behind a precious film archive preserved since December 2015 at the Historical Archive of the Cineteca Italiana in Milan.