There are those who try to get back on their feet, those who seek comfort, there are places, spaces, events, some well-known, others less so, those who were someone and those who try in every way not to disappear. And among them all, there is cinema, the camera that tells stories near and far, of our territory and beyond. Contemporary Italy, seen through the eyes of directors and authors who have made stories with unique power their own, received through the antennae of a mysterious radio device called creativity or empathy. All this is Biografilm Italia, from Pilastro to Geneva, from Sardinia to Sicily, from Berlin to Africa.
World Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 72')
In the 1980s, Loris Stecca was the youngest world boxing champion in Italian sports history. An assault boxer capable of making television, audiences, and sponsors dream, he then fell into a downward spiral. Today, at 65, after serving an eight-year sentence for the attempted murder of his former business partner, he works as a garbage collector for a social cooperative. But his endless struggle continues, as he attempts to clear his name with the help of his daughter. Or perhaps Loris is simply trying to save his soul, guided by a spiritual mentor. The toughest opponent to beat is always the same: his own endless anger.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 70')
Maurizio Pierini is a research physicist at CERN in Geneva. Since the Higgs Boson discovery in 2012, no new physics has emerged, and many questions remain frustratingly unanswered. Maurizio works on a particle detector called CMS. He wants to upgrade it with an AI tool that can detect anomalous phenomena at unprecedented speeds. He needs to convince colleagues and secure a massive amount of funding. He succeeds, he makes a team of young physicists. They publish 4 papers and then they produce the tool that now is online. Will it work? Can they push CMS beyond the Higgs boson and into the realm of new physics?
World Premiere
(Doc / Fiction / Italy, USA / 2025 / 70')
What does a swordfish’s call sound like? This question is the starting point for Giacomo Triglia's visionary film: a poetic tale of love, memory, and transformation. In the village of Scilla, Peppe is making a documentary about swordfish fishing in order to rediscover himself and Lucia, his lost love. The journey takes him to a world suspended between dream and reality, populated by symbolic figures and giant papier-mâché creatures. On this journey of rediscovery, the protagonist identifies with the male swordfish, faces the pain of loss, and rediscovers the lost melody
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 68')
Claudia and Eleonora, sisters of the same age, spent the first part of their lives as allies. As they grew up, they became strangers to each other. The need to accept Claudia's faults, who started taking crack, and to atone for her own, drives Eleonora to seek a new path together. The documentary opens with a childhood drawing by Claudia: “Dear Mom and Dad, I love you so much. I don't know where I am anymore. Help me. From Claudia.” Through a journey into the ancestral heart of Sicily, along the Via Francigena, the two sisters try to find each other again.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 72')
After enduring the trauma of a brutal gang rape, young dancer Thea confronts her pain through her choreography, transforming her vulnerability into a quiet yet fierce bravery. With the unwavering support of her partner Thiago and the unconditional love of their dog Mandinga, Thea discovers a safe space to begin piecing together her shattered world. The birth of her son Monan redefines her relationship with her body and sense of self. We follow Thea's most intimate struggles through her personal video diaries, intertwined with the tender lens of her childhood friend, filmmaker Felix. The film highlights the vital roles that empathy, dignity, and love play in times of darkness.
World Premiere
(Doc / Italy, Poland / 2025 / 66')
After sixty years of theatrical and performance research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during martial law in Poland. Advancing age forces her to interrupt her workshops, which for years have involved people from all over the world. The separation from her students, some of whom have been close to her for decades, is painful. Her theatrical practice is based on direct transmission, from person to person, which is difficult to preserve over time. Her return to her homeland opens up a confrontation with the wounds of history and the weight of a life spent away from home.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 80')
The history of the Pilastro district begins in the 1960s, with a group of council houses a few kilometers from the center of Bologna, built in response to the demand for housing for the growing number of immigrants in the post-war period. In the shadow of the “Virgolone”, one of the largest residential complexes in the city, a neighborhood with almost seven thousand inhabitants grows, today often at the center of media attention only for crimes and crime stories.
Through the history of the neighborhood and its inhabitants, the film explores the relationship between city spaces and daily experiences, in a context where challenges and contradictions in urban development are evident.
World Premiere, First Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 75')
A 20-year long friendship and a past similarly marked by tragic events unite Ben, a European filmmaker, and Negi, an Indian Buddhist. Fascinated by the possibility of finding in Negi a spiritual guide to come to terms with death, Ben relives and shares his personal story. His journey leads him to deal with the role life has given him, closely linked to his relationship with his father. As the impossibility of finding clear and definitive answers becomes apparent, the deeply human need to accept death emerges, transcending cultural, religious, and geographical barriers.
World Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Italy / 2025 / 53')
French lawyer Mireille Delmas-Marty, convinced that art and law should stimulate imagination and action, teams up with Italian artist Antonio Benincà to create an installation-manifesto, the Compass of Possibilities, to help navigate the ocean of globalization. A deep friendship develops between them. When Mireille is hospitalized, Antonio helps her escape from the hospital and welcomes her into his maison bulle in the South of France. After a few months of intense vitality, Mireille dies. Respecting her wishes, Antonio goes to Bologna to present the Compass: one of the first initiatives to spread the vision of a more interconnected, supportive, and inclusive world.
World Premiere, Second Film
(Doc / Italy, France / 2025 / 70')
Giving voice to the voiceless: this was the revolution of Giorgio Lolli, a former worker and trade unionist from Bologna, self-taught technician of free radio stations. During his 40 years in Africa, he built over 500 radio stations from Togo to Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso. With his company Solaire, he was the first to install FM radios using transmitters that anyone could afford, giving a voice to communities in the most isolated areas. The film follows his ‘disciple’ Abdrahmane Cissoko as he works to set up a radio station for young migrants on the border between Senegal, Mali and Mauritania. It ends with the birth of Radio Solaire Livorno, a pirate radio station for the multi-ethnic community in Tuscany.
