Festival of peoples in Florence

Born from an idea of some cinema experts and specialists in human science (sociologists, mass-media experts, but also anthropologists and ethnologists) who believed that documentary movies could be useful as a tool of social and anthropological research, the Festival is a competition which awards a prize to the best works realized by documentarists coming from all over the world, but it also hosts many parallel activities, such as concerts, workshops, conferences and expositions.

The Festival is meant to explore not only the subject of what has been filmed, but also the language that documentarists use to express themselves: the opinion of the organisers of the Festival, indeed, is that, although documentaries are by definition representation of the real, and although they mostly have an anthropological mission, still they can be field of investigation as far as cinematographic expression is concerned: a documentary film should not limit itself to strict rules; on the contrary, as a form of art, it should explore new cinematographic forms. The documentary indeed is intended not only as a useful instrument to bear witness, but also as a form of personal expression.

We could say that the Festival gives importance both to the form and to the contents of documentaries: on one hand it usually deals with important contemporary issues, such as water resource, the role of family in the third millennium, western medical practices and traditional healing, immigration, architecture and development of urban landscape; on the other hand, during the festival many debates take place in which issues of cinematographic representation (such as televised journalism or the evolution of technique in European cinema) are discussed.

The Festival is divided in three sections: the first consists of the documentaries which take part in the international competition (a prize of 10,000€ is given to the documentary which is voted as the best) and in the Main Programme; the second is the Retrospective, Master, Young Filmmakers and Thematic Section; the third, the Foundation Project, looks at the future of documentary films, trying to promote the production of new documentaries: the Foundation indeed is meant to finance the realization of high-quality creative projects, and in this way the Festival becomes not only an opportunity to watch films and talk about that, but also to plan new films.

The Festival dei Popoli is an important international stage for documentarists, whose works are projected in various cinemas (admission charge for the public), but it is also a great opportunity for the public, who can get to know the best cineastes of the genre (such as Ken Loach, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Lindsay Anderson, just to name some of the participants of the last editions), as well as some of the most important figures of the social science (in the past editions also Umberto Eco, Carlo Tullio Altan, and Roland Barthes took part in the activities) who participate in the conferences and round table discussions which are organised in Florence during the Festival week.

The artistic and cultural heritage of Florence is among the greatest in the world. Positioned at the very centre of Renaissance, home to some of the greatest artists and thinkers who ever lived (Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Vasari), it seems that Florence could never lose her reputation of city of culture, and the Festival dei Popoli is one of the signs of this!

By: Michele De Capitani

This article was written by Michele De Capitani with support from www.flashbooking.com for any information, please visit Vacations Florence Italy or for travel insurance visit cheap hostels Florence.

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