Past Forward - Archive Film Lab is the new workshop dedicated to rough cuts of documentaries based on archive images, organised in collaboration with Archivio Aperto, the festival dedicated to the rediscovery of small-format film heritage - private, amateur, experimental, artist - and its contemporary reuse, organised by Home Movies - Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia. Born in Bologna in 2008 as a day to open the archive to the public, over the years it has developed into a festival, with an international competition, focuses and retrospectives.
In addition to being seen in festivals and exhibitions, archive-based documentaries and found footage films are increasingly present and visible in distribution circuits, TV channels and platforms. This is an audiovisual production and market sector of great interest and potential, which generates and requires specific professional experience and opportunities.
The teams of the 4 selected projects will have the opportunity to participate in a training and consultancy workshop that will provide participants with an in-depth in-presence feedback session and two subsequent online sessions.
The workshop will lead to a final showcase within Bio to B - Industry Days | Doc (7 June 2025), in front of an audience of decision makers.
The workshop tutors are established professionals in directing, editing and research, with specific and relevant experience in the re-use of archive material:
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE TUTORS
Director: Davide Rizzo (Italy, production: Naffintusi)
From Scandinavia to Southern Italy, to Latin America, De Mislykkede - I falliti - tells the extraordinary epic of Odin Teatret, the company born from the rejection of academies that transformed failure into a theatrical revolution.
Director: Benedetta Valabrega (Italy, production: ZaLab Film)
A journey through China, from the 1970s to today, through the diaries and archive images of Carlo Laurenti, essayist and translator of classical Chinese works. Not a biography, but a wandering reflection, like its protagonist.
Director: Alessandro Focareta (Argentina, Italy, Dominican Republic, production: Apolide Film)
Carlo, the director's father, lives in a small village in the Samnite Apennines, works the land and picks the flowers he lays on his wife Carmela's grave. Between family archives and archive images, an area marked by dramatic depopulation emerges.
Director: Valentina Noya (Italy, production: Tekla Films)
The Apgar Index recounts from an intimate and personal point of view the research into the interrupted relationship of Valentina, the director, with her brother Andrea, starting from the past, tracing three generations through the family cinema of her grandfather, the Sardinian director Fiorenzo Serra.
Director: Giulia Di Maggio (Italy, production: Nefertiti Film)
After the sudden death of her mother Angela, the filmmaker starts filming her maternal grandmothers. An unexpected gift peeps into the attic, an old bag containing 40 diaries dated 1973-2016: the diaries of Angela's life. Her voice guides the journey between the present of filming and the past of historical and family archives.
Director: Gaetano Crivaro, Margherita Pisano (Italy, production: Mommotty, Ruga Film)
A montage film that uses more than 60 years of accounts of one of the most important tourism development operations in the Mediterranean - ‘the invention of the Costa Smeralda’ - in search of the ways through which an imaginary is constructed.
On 16 and 17 April, the first feedback session for Past Forward projects took place. During these two days, the tutors - editor Ilaria Fraioli, director Martina Parenti and archive producer Alessia Petitto - together with the artistic director of Archivio Aperto Sergio Fant and the coordinator of Bio to B - Industry Days | Doc&Drama and Senior Programmer of Biografilm Caterina Mazzucato viewed the rough cuts of the six selected projects and spoke with the respective teams in view of the public presentation that will take place during Bio to B - Industry Days | Doc.
