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CANTARUTTI IS A distinguished-looking man, 66, with a full head of snowy white hair and white eyebrows that are seldom at rest in his animated face. He and his wife still live in the comfortable home where their two sons grew up, on a hillside in west San Rafael. On the day I drop by, his wife has gone to visit her ailing mother in South Carolina, leaving him alone in the house with his longhaired orange cat, Mandarino, to whom Cantarutti speaks only Italian. The blinds are closed against the Indian summer sun that still floods the living room with light. The radio is tuned to an R&B station. A spinet stands against one wall next to a potted ficus. Cantarutti—when he stays seated, which is never for long—is on the sofa opposite a white marble-faced fireplace.

His parents both came from villages in the Friuli region of Italy. It’s an agricultural area in the far northeast corner of the country on the Adriatic Sea, a place so remote as to have its own language. His father came to the United States first, joined later by his mother and older brother. In the early days, they lived in Santa Cruz while his dad worked in the fields picking Brussels sprouts and artichokes. Cantarutti was born in 1939 after his father got a job with a garbage company and the family had moved to Richmond. When the U.S. entered World War II, Italian nationals were considered a security risk and were forced to leave the Bay Area. “They called us aliens,” recalls Cantarutti. The family moved to Asti in Sonoma County, returning to the East Bay after the war.

Cantarutti grew up hearing only gloomy stories from his parents about the hardships they endured in the old country. In contrast, he saw the U.S. as a land of prosperity and opportunity and, naturally, cast his identity as an all-American boy. He knew nothing of the glories of the Roman Empire, or of Italy’s contribution to the arts. It came as a complete surprise to him when, as a freshman in college, he first heard of the Italian Renaissance. He was suddenly shot through with pride in his parents’ homeland. He went on to earn a master’s degree in Romance Languages and Literature at UC Berkeley, while his father worked on campus as a gardener.

He joined the Army as an officer, stationed in Miami with an intelligence unit. Fluent in Spanish, he did background investigations of Cubans who fled here after the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was later transferred to South Carolina, where he met the Southern belle who became his wife. When his two years in the military were up, he brought her home with him to California and the young couple moved in with his parents. His wife and his father became particularly fond of each other, holding long, animated conversations—although, between her Southern accent and his limited English, neither one understood much of what the other was saying. After their first son was born, Cantarutti got a job at Crown Zellerbach and he and his wife moved into their own place in Marin. He started out in customer service and worked his way up to national manager of the department.

When Cantarutti was growing up, his father always spoke dreamily about someday taking him to see his own boyhood home in Friuli. Cantarutti now looks down and shakes his head. “He didn’t make it,” he says in a voice thick with emotion. Cantarutti made his first trip to Italy when he was 30, along with his mother and cousins. His father, who had already taken ill, would die two years later.

After hearing all the dark tales of poverty when he was a kid, Cantarutti wasn’t sure what to expect. He’d be spending three weeks in the home of an aunt and uncle he’d never met, people whose primary language was Friulian, which Cantarutti understood better than he could speak. Traveling by train, he sweltered in his wool suit for the long, hot ride. Yet his heart leapt when they pulled into the station and he saw the name on the sign: Udine! This was the city his parents always told him about, a storied land come to life.

The village of Rodeano Basso, where his mother grew up, was another 10 miles away. When the taxi pulled up to the house, all the relatives poured out onto the street to greet them—aunts, uncles, cousins. For the next few weeks he slept on a mattress stuffed with cornhusks. Water was heated by butane, so hot baths were considered a luxury. The toilet was outside. Electricity was intermittent. There was no phone. It was as if he had traveled back in time. “Welcome to Italy, 1969!” he says. “My aunt was so sweet, and she was so happy to have us. But the accommodations were rustic. There was no chocolate on the pillows.”

A few years after that first trip, Cantarutti returned with his wife and two sons to Perugia, in central Italy, for intensive study of the Italian language. “My children and my wife went to the beginning level. And I wanted to keep my skills up and to deepen them.” He had grown up with three languages—his parents spoke mostly Friulian, with a little Italian and a little English. “As time went on and I went to school, I was learning more and more American English, so I didn’t really concentrate very much on Italian. That’s why I had to come back to it and study it at Cal, so I could retrieve and improve on what I had gotten at home.” When he got out of the Army, he continued taking night classes. It was the night course in Italian at College of Marin that led to the launch of the first Italian Film Festival. It started in 1976, when he and a classmate screened some old 16mm classics in a lecture hall at the college.

Initially, they didn’t present the festival every year, yet their audience grew. Cantarutti eventually took the reins and he’s been producing it single-handedly every year since 1985. Gradually he made the shift to new, independent films. Since 1989, he’s held the festival at the Showcase Theater at Marin Center for six consecutive weekends. This year, he’s added a seventh week and a new venue, with one film to be shown at the Lark Theater. He has a mailing list of 3,100. Most screenings sell out.

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CANTARUTTI HAS BEEN a fan of Italian movies most of his life. He loves the classics by Fellini and De Sica. Perhaps his favorite movie is The Tree of Wooden Clogs, directed by Ermanno Olmi, a film that seemed to document the life his parents had left behind. “Oh, my God, that blew me away,” he says. “My wife and I went to see it at the Surf Theater in the city. It’s a story about five peasant families that live in the north of Italy, eking out a living as sharecroppers around the turn of the last century. It’s their struggle, the relationship among the five families, the relationship to the landlord. The music is J.S. Bach. The setting is real people, dealing with life and death struggles. To me, that film was a milestone.”

Cantarutti was delighted to be able to present the movie at one of his festivals—and he made sure his family would be there. “My mom came to see that show when I did it here in Marin, and some cousins came, also. There were tears everywhere. It definitely hit home for us.”

This year’s lineup includes lots of love stories and an even mix of drama and comedy. “I am unabashedly a fan of comedy, so Do You Know Claudia? is a personal favorite,” says Cantarutti. “It stars three popular and very funny comics—Aldo Baglio, Giovanni Storti and Giacomo Poretti. They are such creative comedians. I also like People of Rome. The format is unique—a bus ride through Rome. The director, Ettore Scola, shows us some very thoughtful insights about the city. There are funny situations, but it makes you think, too.”

The festival is pretty much a one-man show for Cantarutti. Volunteers staff the tables at the screenings, gathering names for the mailing list and selling vintage posters. He also gets help with the design on the promotional materials. He handles all the other details himself, down to overseeing the printing and mailing of programs. The financing comes out of his pocket. “I have a little bit of sponsorship from the Italian government, a little from a travel company. But 95 percent of the budget comes from my own money,” he says. “The target is to cover my expenses and have just a little bit of seed money left over to get started for next year—and that’s exactly what we’ve always done.”

He spends months looking for the best films to show each year. He goes to Italy to attend screenings and to schmooze with distributors. Once he receives preview videos, he watches them, start to finish, making detailed notes. Then come the negotiations—finding out what’s available, making deals, arranging for shipment. Most of this work is done from 7,000 miles away in a time zone that’s nine hours behind. He works in a tiny office in the basement of his home in San Rafael. He keeps a single bed next to his desk so he can nap until midnight, when he can begin making calls. Since he retired from his corporate job six years ago, he’s been able to catch a few more hours of sleep later in the day.

As the films arrive, Cantarutti takes them to the projectionist at the theater to run through each one and check the splices. Once that’s done, says Cantarutti, “it’s showtime! Act One of the Italian Film Festival is the arrival of the people at the theater. I’m there and I greet as many of them as I can, individually and personally, by name. This is not just going to see a movie. This is an event. This is an entertainment evening.”

For all the hard work that Cantarutti pours into the festival each year, he’s clearly having a ball every step of the way. He has also been gratified to receive considerable honors for his promotion of Italian culture. He was Marin County’s Italian-American Citizen of the Year in 1986. He’s been granted honorary citizenship in his family’s native village in Friuli. In 1988, the Italian government named him a cavaliere—akin to knighthood—and in 2003, his rank was elevated to cavaliere ufficiale. Not bad for the son of a poor Italian peasant. His father would certainly have been proud.