presenting partner 
This year Biografilm, the film festival dedicated to the telling of life stories through fiction and documentary films, expands its cultural offerings with a new space dedicated to storytelling: Biograbook, the festival's literary salon, is born.
From June 7 to 14, in the evocative setting of Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini, Biograbook, curated in collaboration with Marco Nardini of Otago Literary Agency, offers a cycle of seven meetings to present as many new publishing titles. An opportunity to get to know established authors and new voices on the national literary scene - in dialogue with intellectuals and cultural figures - up close, starting with their latest works.
More than just a exhibition, Biograbook is a true open-air cultural salon: a place for discussion, exchange and reflection, where the story of lives is intertwined between the pages of a book as well as between the images of a film. Because, in all forms, Biografilm is and remains a celebration of the telling of life and lives.
Biograbook will take place at 18.30 at Piazzetta Pier Paolo Pasolini, Via Azzo Gardino 65.
This year we will have the pleasure of hosting:
- Saturday 7: Valeria Mannelli, Gian Maria Volonté. L’immagine e la memoria (Transeuropa)
- Sunday 8: Andrea Pomella, Vite nell’oro e nel blu (Einaudi)
- Monday 9: Modena City Ramblers, Nati per la libertà (La nave di Teseo)
- Tuesday 10: Martino Giordano, Variazioni sul tema (Solferino)
- Thursday 12: Vito di Battista, Dove cadono le comete (Feltrinelli)
- Friday 13: Alae Al Said, Il ragazzo con la kefiah arancione (Ponte alle Grazie)
- Saturday 14: Diego Cugia, Il principe azzurro (Giunti)
Valeria Mannelli (La Spezia, 1968) graduated in film history and critic in Rome. In the 1990s she wrote for the magazines Cinemasessanta and Cinema d'Essai and worked as a production assistant. She participated as a correspondent in several film festivals: Venice, Cannes, Bergamo, Pesaro. From 1996 to 2001 she worked at the Cineteca di Bologna as curator of projects dedicated to screenwriting, acting, cinematography direction. She has directed meetings with directors and screenwriters such as Atom Egoyan, Francesco Rosi, Suso Cecchi d'Amico. Since 1999 she has lived in Bologna where he teaches Letters, History and Geography in middle schools.
Gian Maria Volonté. L’immagine e la memoria (Transeuropa, 2024) is a tribute to one of the most significant figures in Italian cinema. The book - revised and expanded in its third edition - consists of a biographical essay that traces the main steps of Gian Maria Volonté's film career; the last (and unpublished) interview Volonté gave; interviews with the filmmakers who best and longest worked with him; and, finally, a critical essay that investigates the modes of his work as an actor.
Andrea Pomella (Rome, 1973). Born and raised in Rome, he began his career by publishing art monographs on Caravaggio and Van Gogh, before making his fiction debut in 2008 with Il soldato bianco. His novels include Anni luce (2018), among the 12 nominees for the Premio Strega, and L'Uomo che trema (2019), winner of the Premio Napoli. He has collaborated with Il Fatto Quotidiano and Rivista Studio. He writes for the online magazines DoppioZero, minima&moralia and The Italian Review. He is a creative writing teacher at the School of the Book in Rome and the Holden School in Turin.
Vite nell’oro e nel blu (Einaudi, 2025), narrates the lives of Mario Schifano, Franco Angeli, the brothers Tano Festa and Francesco Lo Savio. Against the backdrop of the Rome of the 1960s, each lives his “golden hour”: they conquer the most coveted women, go to live in luxurious aristocratic palaces, travel to every continent, compulsively earn and splurge, but above all they paint like obsessives, without respite, signing works that mark the Italian iconographic imagination of the second half of the twentieth century. But the climate of the country soon changes and their names sink into oblivion. They face the years of the fall, the slide into madness, arrests, drug addiction, blackmail by the underworld, hospitalizations and asylums. Shaping an epic that unfolds along half a century of Italian history, Andrea Pomella writes the adventurous novel of four unforgettable existences, capable of touching - and returning to us - the defenseless beauty of life.
A historic Italian music group formed in 1991, the Modena City Ramblers began as an Irish folk group, but over time their music has been enriched by various influences: from Italian folk song - but also Scottish, Celtic, Balkan... - all the way to rock and punk. A completely original mixture of genres, but without losing the values that have always distinguished them: the struggle against injustice, the focus on political-social issues and the memory of the Resistance.
Nati per la libertà. Racconti resistenti (La nave di Teseo, 2025) is their first book. Lives, almost all of them true (partly from the personal or family background of the authors themselves), of human beings “born for freedom”: partisans and non-partisans, often men and women too ordinary to be remembered as heroes, but equally protagonists of the dramatic and passionate struggle that led to the Liberation of our country.
Martino Giordano (Palermo, 1997) graduated in Literature from the University of Palermo and lived for a year in Prague. He studied at the Holden School, in Turin, where he currently lives and attends a master's degree program in Comparative Literature. In 2017 he began a transitional journey as a nonbinary person.
Variazioni sul tema (Solferino, 2025) is his debut novel. At the center of the story are the lives of Lidia and Leo, two completely different young people in two different cities - Palermo and Prague - who face the same crossroads: deciding who they want to be and finding their place in the world. In the fullness and emptiness of Lidia and Leo's stories, which mirror and chase each other across years and distances, Martino Giordano injects a powerful mixture of ferocity, misery, pity and indulgence. A novel that digs deep, exploring the geography of two cities full of contrasts and invaded by music, in which an unequal struggle is staged: that against oneself.
Vito di Battista (Lanciano, 1986) grew up in a town in Abruzzo three hundred steps above the sea. He studied Comparative Literature in Florence and Bologna, where he currently lives. He made his debut with the novel L'ultima diva dice addio (SEM, 2018), a finalist in several literary awards. In 2023 came out Il buon uso della distanza (Gallucci), winner of the Iannas Prize and best book of the year for @GatsbyBooks.
Dove cadono le comete (Feltrinelli, 2025). Abruzzo, 1938. A village on the Trabocchi coast. A family saga that becomes a choral tale of an entire village, where private stories with an ancient flavor intertwine with the great History, from the occupation during World War II and the clashes on the Gustav Line to the rebirth in the 1960s. Dove cadono le comete follows the fortunes of Emma, a twice-shamed girl whose eyes and hands are charged with some dark ability; of Olympus, a young man who does not become a shoemaker like all his lineage but chooses to be a journalist and a poet; of Anita, a woman who loses an arm and is (perhaps) condemned to a lonely life. With a magnetic and visceral voice, loaded with suggestions, Vito di Battista - drawing inspiration from true stories of his family - composes a fresco in which events that touch us closely are tinged with visionary charm, and the real and the invisible come to merge into a single horizon.
Alae Al Said (Rome, 1991) was born in Italy to Palestinian parents. She grew up with a love for her homeland and a strong sense of justice. She graduated in International Studies at the University of Milan and, in 2019, published her first novel, Sabun. She is currently pursuing studies in International Relations.
Il ragazzo con la kefiah arancione (Ponte alle Grazie, 2025). In the 1990s, in the West Bank, Loai Qasrawi tells a journalist the story of his keffiyeh factory, but a simple question reopens the wound of a distant memory: an orange keffiyeh, a symbol of a friendship and a struggle. In the early 1960s, Loai is a shy boy mocked for his red hair until he forms a deep bond with Ahmad, a proud and courageous young man. Their adolescence is shattered by the Six-Day War and the occupation, which turn school humiliations into a struggle for survival and identity. Il ragazzo con la kefiah arancione is a story of friendship, betrayal, resistance, and forgiveness in a battered land: the private stories of the protagonists are intertwined with those of a people who in their ability to resist have shown their strength, tenaciously claiming the right to their land.
Diego Cugia (Rome, 1953) is a writer and screenwriter. After his beginnings as a variety writer for radio and television shows, he turned to film and fiction. In 1998 he brought to life the character of Jack Folla: a DJ sentenced to death in the United States who is given a voice on an Italian radio station (Rai Radio 2). He draws from it a highly successful book, Alcatraz. Jack Folla, un dj nel braccio della morte, published by Rai-Eri and Mondadori. Among his most popular novels: No (2001); Il mercante di fiori (2002); Un amore all’inferno (2005); Tango alla fine del mondo (2013).
Il principe azzurro (Giunti, 2025) transports us to the 13th century to tell the story of the short but intense life of Conradin of Swabia, the Italo-German prince who, at only sixteen years old, descended on Italy in 1266 at the head of an army to make it united and free from the pope and foreign powers, half a millennium ahead of Garibaldi A tale that weaves epic and introspection, dream and tragedy, to restore the young prince-who could have changed the history of Italy and our lives-to his place in the collective imagination.
