Biografilm Poetry
Biografilm Poetry – La vita che scrive
Biografilm was created as a space for telling lives, but not in the narrow sense of biography: it is a place where stories are transformed, questioned, and opened up to different forms of narration. Fiction and documentary cinema have always shared this tension toward reality and its possibilities.
For the first time this year, the festival is dedicating an entire day to poetry. A natural, almost necessary opening: poetry as an essential form of storytelling, capable of traversing lives without directly representing them, of restoring their rhythm, fractures, and intensities. A space where language works through subtraction, echo, and vision.
The poetry day thus becomes part of the program as a different device for listening, one that continues—through another language—Biografilm’s exploration of the forms of living and storytelling.
Bringing these two forms into dialogue means opening up a question about storytelling itself: what does it mean to “tell a life”? What are its margins, its omissions, its possibilities of transformation?
In their encounter, cinema and poetry do not translate into one another, but rather expose each other’s limits. It is precisely in this space—between vision and language, between life and words—that a new form of storytelling can emerge: more fragile and at the same time more radical, capable of conveying not so much facts, but the experience of living.
This first edition of Biografilm Poetry – La vita che scrive opens with a meeting with the master of contemporary poetry Milo De Angelis.
Milo De Angelis
Milo De Angelis lives in Milan, where he was born in 1951. He has published Somiglianze (Guanda, 1976); Millimetri (Einaudi, 1983); Terra del viso (Mondadori, 1985); Distante un padre (Mondadori, 1989); Biografia sommaria (Mondadori, 1999); Tema dell’addio (Mondadori, 2005); Quell’andarsene nel buio dei cortili (Mondadori, 2010); Incontri e agguati (Mondadori, 2015); Linea intera, linea spezzata (Mondadori, 2021); Poesie dell’inizio 1967–1973 (Mondadori, 2025). He has also written the short story La corsa dei mantelli (Guanda, 1979) and a volume of essays (Poesia e destino, Cappelli, 1982). In 2017, Mondadori published a collection of his poems (Tutte le poesie 1969–2015). He has translated from French and from classical languages.
The Residency
Within Biografilm Poetry a residency takes shape dedicated to four emerging voices in contemporary Italian poetry, invited to experience the festival as a space for exploration and research.
Over the course of several days, the poets will be immersed in the festival program, engaging with a curated selection of films conceived as sites of activation: not objects for critical analysis, but opportunities for listening and resonance.
Screening thus becomes the starting point for a writing workshop in which cinema is neither translated nor interpreted, but rather traversed. Images, rhythms and narrative structures act as catalysts, opening up a space in which poetry may emerge as an autonomous and creative response.
The aim is to generate a kind of chemical reaction between viewing and writing: a field of tension in which cinematic storytelling and poetic language intersect and contaminate one another, giving rise to texts born from the shared experience of seeing.
The residency thus becomes not only a place of production and research, but also a moment of exchange and restitution, in which the texts developed through the workshop enter into dialogue with the wider context of the festival.
The protagonists
Meet the protagonists of the first edition of the Biografilm Poetry residency.
Tommaso Di Dio
Tommaso Di Dio (1982) lives and works in Milan. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Tua e di tutti (Pordenonelegge, 2014), Verso le stelle glaciali (Interlinea, 2020), Nove lame azzurre fiammeggianti nel tempo (Scalpendi, 2022), and Ardore (Nino Aragno, 2023). He works in literary criticism and translation. He edited the first Italian edition of the American classic Spring and All (Ibis, 2020) by W.C. Williams, as well as a selection of Dylan Thomas’s poetry, Visione e preghiera (Giometti&Antonello, 2023). Since its foundation, together with Carlo Sini and Florinda Cambria, he has been a member of the scientific committee of the philosophy and culture laboratory Mechrí. In 2023, he edited an anthology of Italian poetry from the last fifty years: Poesie dell’Italia contemporanea (Il Saggiatore).
Andrea Donaera
Andrea Donaera was born in 1989 in Salento, where he currently lives. He has published several poetry collections, including Una Madonna che mai appare (in the 14th Quaderno Italiano di poesia contemporanea; Marcos y Marcos, 2019) and Le estreme conseguenze (Le Lettere, 2023). He is also the author of several novels: Io sono la bestia (NNE, 2019), Lei che non tocca mai terra (NNE, 2021), and La colpa è mia (Bompiani, 2024). He works as an editor and proofreader for various publishing houses and is a teaching assistant in Contemporary Italian Literature at the University of Salento.
Elena Lacentra
Elena Lacentra (Bellinzona, 2001) holds a degree in Italian literature and art history. She pursued her university studies between Fribourg, Bologna, and Pisa. In 2025, she was awarded the Alma Mater Violani Landi unpublished works prize (ex aequo) for her poetry collection Glanage.
Giada Borgagni
Giada Borgagni was born in San Marino in 2000. She was introduced to poetry as a teenager through a poetry workshop within the project Lo spazio bianco delle arti, later continuing her educational and associative activities during her university years in Bologna, where she became an active member of the Centro Contemporanea di Bologna. In 2024/25, she participated in several literary prizes and was invited to Villa delle Ginestre in Torre del Greco, the LericiPea festival, and Amici di Nicco.
She has worked as an educator in a residential community for unaccompanied foreign minors and attends the film academy La Valigia dell’Attore. She has also worked as a tutor alongside the poet Isabella Leardini in the poetry workshop Circolo dei poeti nascosti at the A. Panzini middle school in Rimini. Some of her poems have appeared on the websites of Vallecchi Firenze and Poeti Oggi.
In 2025, she won the Alma Mater Violani Landi Poetry Prize (unpublished works) with her collection La corsa della figlia. Her debut poetry manuscript of the same title will be published by Puntoacapo Editore. She is also one of the selected winners of the 2026 Seriality and Audiovisual Course at Bottega Finzioni.
To date, she works on theatre projects, on independent and non-independent film sets, and as an educator.
The curators
Meet the curators of the first edition of the Biografilm Poetry residency.
Emanuela Ceddia works in the field of cinema. She is one of the founders of the Biografilm Festival and is currently Vice President of the film distribution company I Wonder Pictures. Alongside her work in film promotion and distribution, she also pursues her study of poetry, publishing her first collection Essere Transitivo with Lieto Colle in 2017. Biografilm Poesia emerges from the combination of her experience in these two worlds and the passion that drives her in both.
Franca Mancinelli is a poet and writer. Among her most recent books are Libretto di transito (2018) and Tutti gli occhi che ho aperto (Marcos y Marcos, 2020 – awarded the Europa in Versi Prize 2021 and the San Vito al Tagliamento Prize 2022/23). Her entire body of work is available in English translation by John Taylor, published in four volumes by The Bitter Oleander Press and Black Square Editions (New York). She leads workshops focused on listening and experiencing poetic language (for Teatro Valdoca and Scuola Holden). She collaborates with the Pordenonelegge Foundation and the Calzolari Foundation. Together with Rossana Abis, she curates the poetry series Cantus firmus (AnimaMundi Edizioni).
Diario di passo | www.francamancinelli.com
Program
Friday, June 12, 8:30 p.m. @ Chiostro del complesso di Santa Cristina “Della Fondazza” (Piazza Giorgio Morandi, 2)
Cercherò le parole che ti salvano with Milo De Angelis in conversation with Emanuela Ceddia and Franca Mancinelli. At 9:30 p.m. the night will continue with a screening of a film from the Contemporary Lives section, introduced by Ceddia and Mancinelli with Milo De Angelis
Partners
