Gillo Pontecorvo

Italian director best known for The Battle of Algiers, a classic work on the struggle for liberation from the French

Gillo Pontecorvo, who has died aged 86, was a gentle man with kind, twinkling eyes, who, among innumerable achievements, directed the classic film The Battle of Algiers (1965). Edward Said said that The Battle of Algiers and Queimada (1969), Pontecorvo's next film, were the two greatest political films ever made. He also said that Pontecorvo's political work for the cinema made it possible for directors such as Costa-Gavras to emerge, as well as influencing other film-makers in the Third World.

During the 1960s, Pontecorvo became convinced that the anti-colonialist wars of the time were an important theme for a film. In 1962, he and fellow director Franco Solinas went to Algeria - as its war of independence against France was concluding - armed with false papers and the idea of building a story around a former paratrooper during that war. Franco Cristaldi, the producer, did not want to make the film, not least since the French extreme right-wing group, the OAS, was planting bombs against those who supported the Algerian cause.

Then, in 1964, after independence, former Algerian guerrilla Salah Baazi visited Italy in search of a director to make a film on the independence struggle. He met Pontecorvo, whose idea for Para, as the film was going to be called, did not appeal. Baazi did not want a film that treated the subject from a European point of view. Pontecorvo eventually proposed an alternative scenario, offering to work for nothing in case the film did not please the Algerians. In return, the then ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) would assist Pontecorvo and Solinas to find and interview activists. The writing of the screenplay ("a fiction written under the dictatorship of fact") was long and arduous, but when Pontecorvo arrived in Algiers, it was discovered that the script had been left on the roof of a car. Two weeks later sections of it appeared in a French rightwing newspaper.

The Algerian general strike of 1957 was the focus of the black and white film. All the players, with the exception of Jean Martin (Colonel Mathieu), were non-professionals. Pontecorvo co-wrote the score with Ennio Morricone and he continued to write scores for his films, maintaining they were structured with music in mind (he regarded The Battle of Algiers as having a "symphonic structure").

When The Battle of Algiers was screened at the Venice Film Festival in 1966, it received a great ovation. Pontecorvo maintained it was the most emotional moment of his life. He won the Golden Lion, but the French delegation left in protest and the film was not distributed in France until 1971. Death threats deterred cinema owners, and it was only through pressure from the director, Louis Malle, and others that it was eventually shown.

Pontecorvo was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Pisa, the fifth of eight children - none of whom had any sense of being Jewish, though the family was strongly anti-fascist, and suffered for it. His brothers, Guido and Bruno, found fame as scientists, but in 1950, Bruno, who had been involved in the British atom programme decamped to the Soviet Union. The case forced Gillo Pontecorvo to use a pseudonym for his first film. He was devastated by the event.

Prewar, Pontecorvo had studied chemistry at the University of Pisa - in between competing in tennis tournaments. Then, with the advent of Mussolini's race laws, his siblings left Italy, but Gillo "continued to pretend to be a playboy - granted with the defect of being Jewish". But in the late 1930s, Bruno, by then working in a laboratory in Paris, sent Gillo tickets to join him. There, the brothers' social world embraced the Italian anti-fascist movement and Antonio Gramsci.

With the German occupation of Paris, Pontecorvo and Henriette, his girlfriend, migrated to St Tropez, where they lived "outside history", Pontecorvo giving tennis lessons to the local bourgeoisie. They met exiled intellectuals, including the musician René Leibowitz, who taught Pontecorvo piano, harmony and counterpoint. It was here that Pontecorvo and Henriette married.

In 1942, by then a clandestine member of the Italian Communist party, he went to Milan on courier and news-gathering missions. In Italy, he worked on the party's underground newspaper, L'Unita, throughout the summer of 1943, while Milan suffered constant Allied bombardment. Pontecorvo was also involved in organising a youth front, but in 1944 had to go into hiding. He then went to Turin, where he began to organise young factory workers. After the liberation, he became director of Pattuglia, a journal of combined Communist and Socialist youth, then returned to Paris to be the Italian representative of the Youth World Federation. He became a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Picasso. He became Italian representative of the Communist-backed World Federation of Democratic Youth.

Living between Italy and France and working as a journalist, he saw Paisà (1946), directed by Roberto Rossellini (who was to become a good friend). Pontecorvo's love affair with cinema, which had previously revolved around the films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, now centred on neo-realism. Despite the high cost of film, he began shooting anything that interested him with a 16mm camera, making short documentaries.

In 1950, he worked as assistant director to Yves Allegret on I Miracoli Non Si Ripetono (Miracles Only Happen Once) and then, this time on 35mm, made documentaries. In between, he assisted director Giancarlo Menotti on The Medium, and Mario Monicelli on Le Infedeli (1953) and Totò e Carolina (1955).

In the mid-50s, he left the Communist party, broke up with Henriette, and began living with Picci, whom he eventually married. He also met Franco Solinas, with whom he co-wrote Giovanna, an episode in Rose of the Winds (1957), co-ordinated by Joris Ivens, and then his first feature, La Grande Strada Azzura (1957, The Wide Blue Road). This is a story of a poor fisherman, which Pontecorvo wanted to shoot in black and white, but his producer insisted both on colour, and casting Yves Montand and Alida Valli (obituary, April 24 2006), even though Pontecorvo thought Montand too sophisticated for the part.

In 1959, Pontecorvo was asked to make a film on the Nazi concentration camps in which he concentrated on the systematic destruction of human dignity, particularly that of the "kapos" who had the role of keeping their fellow prisoners in order, thus saving their own lives. With Susan Strasberg in the main part, Pontecorvo began his experiments with the negative to produce a grainy, newsreel effect that he would use on The Battle of Algiers. Kapò failed to capture the degradation of the camps and had no sense of real drama, but it received rapturous applause at the Venice Film Festival. It was nominated for best foreign film at the Academy Awards, an event Pontecorvo missed, his past membership of the Communist party causing problems for US immigration.

After the Battle of Algiers came Queimada, a film based on the character of the adventurer, William Walker, who supports a slave rebellion in the Spanish Caribbean on behalf of British interests. Relations between Marlon Brando, who played Walker, deteroriated during filming, so Pontecorvo was surprised, in 1975, to receive a call from Columbia saying that they were interested in hiring him to direct a film with Brando about an event in South Dakota when hundreds of Native Americans occupied Wounded Knee to force the application of the century-old land rights treaty. Columbia pulled out after Brando insisted that the Native Americans be given full political control of the film.

It was 10 years before Pontecorvo made his next film, Ogro (Operation Ogre, 1979), which he always regretted. Inspired by the ETA car bomb murder of Carrerro Blanco, the prime minister of Spain under Franco in 1973, the film's end was changed because of the impact, during filming, of the kidnapping of the politician, Aldo Moro, by the Italian Red Brigades.

Throughout his later life, Pontecorvo tended his tropical plants, added to his collection of glass paintings, composed music, played tennis and took up scuba diving. He was always pondering questions of cinema, including the defence of European film against US domination. Despite illness, he continued to work, making commercials.

In 1992, he became director of the Venice Film Festival, president of Ente cinema - later Cinecitta Holdings - from 1996-99 and in 1996-97, made two short films, Danza della fata Confetto and Nostalgia di protezione. In 2001, together with other Italian directors, he went to Genoa to film the G8 demonstrations which fed into the film Another World Is Possible. After the invasion of Iraq, The Battle of Algiers began to be screened again in festivals and, as a tribute to Brando, Queimada was screened at the Locarno Film Festival in 2004.

Pontecorvo is survived by Picci and three sons, Ludovico, Simone, and the film-maker Marco.

· Gillo (Gilberto) Pontecorvo, film director, screenwriter, born November 19 1919; died October 12 2006