Rocco

Rocco is a 2016 French documentary directed by Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai. It follows the Italian adult-film star Rocco Siffredi during his final year in front of the camera. The film premiered on September 5, 2016, as a special event of the Venice Days section at the Venice Film Festival.

The film moves between Siffredi's working life on sets, including the productions he makes with his cousin and longtime cameraman Gabriele Galetta, and his private life with his wife, Rosa Caracciolo, and their family. Along the way Siffredi talks openly about his childhood, his mother's huge influence on him and the inner conflict he feels about the work that made him famous.

As he gets ready to step away from performing, the film builds toward his last shoot, with the British performer Kelly Stafford. It is a portrait of a man who is unsure about his future and deeply ambivalent about the desire that has driven his whole life.

The directors try to get past the myth of "Rocco Siffredi" and find the man underneath. The film treats him as a conflicted, almost Faustian figure. Early on he says he has "the devil" inside him, and he describes desire as the one god he has served. The film suggests that compulsion, grief and family shape a person as much as free choice does. It also raises questions about power, consent and sexual self-determination. The Huffington Post argued that under the film's raw surface lies a message about how empowered each of us is when it comes to our own sexuality.

Viewers read the film in different ways:

Rocco brought an adult-industry figure to a major art-house festival. It premiered in Venice Days and was treated as a serious biographical documentary, not an exploitation film. The Hollywood Reporter's Boyd van Hoeij called it "a frequently fascinating and beautifully crafted work that tries to paint a nuanced picture of the man himself and, to an extent, the industry in which he worked." The film is part of a wider mainstream interest in Siffredi's life that later included the 2024 Netflix drama series Supersex, based on his story.

The film was well received at its Venice premiere, and critics praised its craft and its nuance. Audience reactions were more divided: its IMDb rating is about 5.7. Viewers valued Siffredi's openness and the conversation on the road trip about dominance and submission. Some found the explicit, "raw, hard-core" material hard to watch and said it is clearly not family viewing.