Marseille,
July 10th 2026
A side letter of accompaniment to the world première of “Schiuma di mondi”
Whilst the planet is grieved by violence and inequalities, it gets more and more difficult to find a way for artists and thinkers to produce something that may be able to nourish the veins of our world and to give us a sort of ‘loan of spirit’ capable of warding off despair, in spite of our sense of helplessness: still it happens that sometimes a gesture, an exchange, sometimes a film may help us to gather the strength to continue with our work of resistance. If we are true to a relational dimension of beings, we can only feel humble and determined to inhabit cultural spaces with a courage that unfolds not as a provocation but as a request that is a cry for life.
In the past years, my doubts about self-absorbed elements of the cultural world have contributed increasing my interest towards the practice of direct solidarity and towards the jurisprudence, where I pinned some hopes of efficacy towards social and ecological justice. Then, again, even jurisprudence is only one of the never-ending possible fields and ways where concrete actions can be undertaken by each of us, each of us differently, in one’s own position in this world and on the social chessboard.
It is not easy to accompany the world première of “Schiuma di mondi” to this festival edition. When I accepted the FID invitation (on May 26th 2026) for our film première, the ongoing tensions about the Jury names were not public. The first information about the boycott and the resigning by Nadav Lapid appeared on Le Monde on June 6th 2026. I felt relieved that Nadav Lapid had decided not to serve in the Jury – nor for his nationality nor for his person – but due to the fact he had accepted economic support by the Israeli Film Funding and taken part in the Israelian Film Festival in Paris and the Ophir Israeli Academy Awards. If only his resignation would have been done willingly, as a concrete gesture to demonstrate he stood in solidarity with the pain of Palestinian civilians! In this case, to take a step back could have meant to take a step forward towards a symbolic planetary cohabitation and co-resistance in front of the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israelian State.
To prioritize the connections between means and ends can make the road much more tortuous and we might have to restrain ourselves, but it is better to work with people we respect rather than formally proclaiming we are free to spit in the hands that feeds us. The idea of the fair-trade is based on this very simple principle and I believe this should be strongly practiced in film productions as well.
A film is political when we dare not to format our moving images and sounds to the ruling forms nor to mannerisms. A film is political when we don’t differ – explicitly or implicitly – from our world present conditions and when we choose not to chase superficially after tragic current events. A film is political when it gives voice to those who have no voice.
A film is political exactly when there is continuity between the film and its means of production. Beyond any narrow-minded moralism, a film is political when a filmmaker leads a life of general coherence between what’s been said in one’s discourse and what’s been done day by day. Hannah Arendt stated that an action can be truly political only when it is driven by amor mundi. Our cinema can aim to be political – it its highest sense – when it does not inflates narcissistic interests and when it’s brought by the altruistic gesture through which a human being gathers the courage to reveal oneself by actions and discourses. May cinema dare to dive into the folds of societies and institutions far beyond provocative surfaces. I do believe cinema can be an ambassy of visions and I hope the space of a cinema may be an ambassy and a shelter for the living beings in their heterogeneity. We know that a decrease of diplomacy only corresponds to the tragic increase of military terms.
There is a mirroring of what I picture in the film “Schiuma di mondi” and what is happening in the present time. In “Schiuma di mondi”, Antonia composes her daily efforts and she gets ceaselessly frustrated by figures who do not restrain themselves to any law nor to any rule nor to any care for a planetary cohabitation. Still, there are bright examples of people whose actions and gestures can be kept in our mind.
Here we are now in the middle of this festival edition and I hope that we will be able to digest the experience of these days and to come to common generative concrete proposals. Which on my side I would start to draft as following.
Culturally:
I shall take part only to festivals that do not ask filmmakers to leave their ideas at the door before entering the stage and therefore I thank FID for welcoming my expressions today, even if/when they might sound uncomfortable at moments. Laws are alive because within these formulations we allow the sensibility of our time to circulate, we let in the air we breathe and we imbue them with our intentions, our hopes, our emotions. Only this way laws can be something that bond us to one another. They are a chosen dynamic self-restriction filled with our will. So, I read on the FID Festival regulation art. 4 that once the program has been announced, a film cannot be withdrawn. To make of such rule a rule that honors filmmakers guests and our conversations, I propose we should add a line to this regulation: festivals should notify the jurors names in strict confidence to all invited filmmakers before the publication of the official program. I hope this controversial situation will push the FID festival and more generally film festivals throughout the world to adopt a different policy in order to allow to each filmmaker the exercise of a more aware choice and self-determination.
Filmically:
When we leave aside festivals and personal names, when we get into the matter of cinema, please allow me to focus on one point that has nothing to do with nationalities and that has much to do with our staying “human” (carrying our human responsibilities without grandeur) and with making films. If we undergo the harsh experience of watching Pier Paolo Pasolini Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) – not one of my most beloved works of him as it lays unfortunately in the cul de sac of the figurative representation of an allegory – we can observe a power scheme at play through a Verfremdungseffekt built up thanks to a precise pictorial approach. This effect reduces the empathic process and we can observe the horror of the abyssal anarchy of power hidden under regulations, legal codes and conditions. If we survive these circles of hell, we land in a room where two soldiers are dancing. Two human beings recall the possibility of an open window towards a more tender dimension of life. This is the ambiguous room where we are asked to install ourselves nowadays, in order to carry the weight of our own present. In our historical period we are asked to tissue new threads between regulations, norms, institutions and social justice. Fifty years afterwards – in a society where anyhow everything is allowed to be visible – to linger nowadays in grotesque fantasies falls under the category of senseless mannerism. The decadency only reveals an excess of indifference, aggravated by a lack of visual distancing. To show in our films voyeurism, submission and dominance can only contribute to the repetition of these power dynamics. May cinema dare to dive into the folds of societies and institutions far beyond provocative surfaces. Sometimes, to be explicitely provocatory does not achieve any real problematization and sometimes the border between parody and propaganda is really thin i.e. through the use of the aesthetics of cruelty.
Politically:
I express my full support to all people acting non-violently and contributing to keep our eyes open on the inhuman conditions of civilians in Palestine. I join my voice to the claims of several government and non-government institutions to demand the execution of the arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu emanated by the International Criminal Court. To demand the allowance of transporting sufficient sanitary goods in Gaza. And to ask the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
No more words. Here I am to ask you to pick up one of these whistles and to whistle with me for a moment. I will not want to whistle against someone or something: I want to whistle for something. Here, at our windows, in our minds, at work, in the streets. And please, as well in this cinema, do feel free to whistle anytime, also during this projection, if you will feel you like: let us say it as an active live musical accompaniment of the film!
Be sure this film will keep on whistling too. - AM
July 10th 2026
A side letter of accompaniment to the world première of “Schiuma di mondi”
Whilst the planet is grieved by violence and inequalities, it gets more and more difficult to find a way for artists and thinkers to produce something that may be able to nourish the veins of our world and to give us a sort of ‘loan of spirit’ capable of warding off despair, in spite of our sense of helplessness: still it happens that sometimes a gesture, an exchange, sometimes a film may help us to gather the strength to continue with our work of resistance. If we are true to a relational dimension of beings, we can only feel humble and determined to inhabit cultural spaces with a courage that unfolds not as a provocation but as a request that is a cry for life.
In the past years, my doubts about self-absorbed elements of the cultural world have contributed increasing my interest towards the practice of direct solidarity and towards the jurisprudence, where I pinned some hopes of efficacy towards social and ecological justice. Then, again, even jurisprudence is only one of the never-ending possible fields and ways where concrete actions can be undertaken by each of us, each of us differently, in one’s own position in this world and on the social chessboard.
It is not easy to accompany the world première of “Schiuma di mondi” to this festival edition. When I accepted the FID invitation (on May 26th 2026) for our film première, the ongoing tensions about the Jury names were not public. The first information about the boycott and the resigning by Nadav Lapid appeared on Le Monde on June 6th 2026. I felt relieved that Nadav Lapid had decided not to serve in the Jury – nor for his nationality nor for his person – but due to the fact he had accepted economic support by the Israeli Film Funding and taken part in the Israelian Film Festival in Paris and the Ophir Israeli Academy Awards. If only his resignation would have been done willingly, as a concrete gesture to demonstrate he stood in solidarity with the pain of Palestinian civilians! In this case, to take a step back could have meant to take a step forward towards a symbolic planetary cohabitation and co-resistance in front of the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the Israelian State.
To prioritize the connections between means and ends can make the road much more tortuous and we might have to restrain ourselves, but it is better to work with people we respect rather than formally proclaiming we are free to spit in the hands that feeds us. The idea of the fair-trade is based on this very simple principle and I believe this should be strongly practiced in film productions as well.
A film is political when we dare not to format our moving images and sounds to the ruling forms nor to mannerisms. A film is political when we don’t differ – explicitly or implicitly – from our world present conditions and when we choose not to chase superficially after tragic current events. A film is political when it gives voice to those who have no voice.
A film is political exactly when there is continuity between the film and its means of production. Beyond any narrow-minded moralism, a film is political when a filmmaker leads a life of general coherence between what’s been said in one’s discourse and what’s been done day by day. Hannah Arendt stated that an action can be truly political only when it is driven by amor mundi. Our cinema can aim to be political – it its highest sense – when it does not inflates narcissistic interests and when it’s brought by the altruistic gesture through which a human being gathers the courage to reveal oneself by actions and discourses. May cinema dare to dive into the folds of societies and institutions far beyond provocative surfaces. I do believe cinema can be an ambassy of visions and I hope the space of a cinema may be an ambassy and a shelter for the living beings in their heterogeneity. We know that a decrease of diplomacy only corresponds to the tragic increase of military terms.
There is a mirroring of what I picture in the film “Schiuma di mondi” and what is happening in the present time. In “Schiuma di mondi”, Antonia composes her daily efforts and she gets ceaselessly frustrated by figures who do not restrain themselves to any law nor to any rule nor to any care for a planetary cohabitation. Still, there are bright examples of people whose actions and gestures can be kept in our mind.
Here we are now in the middle of this festival edition and I hope that we will be able to digest the experience of these days and to come to common generative concrete proposals. Which on my side I would start to draft as following.
Culturally:
I shall take part only to festivals that do not ask filmmakers to leave their ideas at the door before entering the stage and therefore I thank FID for welcoming my expressions today, even if/when they might sound uncomfortable at moments. Laws are alive because within these formulations we allow the sensibility of our time to circulate, we let in the air we breathe and we imbue them with our intentions, our hopes, our emotions. Only this way laws can be something that bond us to one another. They are a chosen dynamic self-restriction filled with our will. So, I read on the FID Festival regulation art. 4 that once the program has been announced, a film cannot be withdrawn. To make of such rule a rule that honors filmmakers guests and our conversations, I propose we should add a line to this regulation: festivals should notify the jurors names in strict confidence to all invited filmmakers before the publication of the official program. I hope this controversial situation will push the FID festival and more generally film festivals throughout the world to adopt a different policy in order to allow to each filmmaker the exercise of a more aware choice and self-determination.
Filmically:
When we leave aside festivals and personal names, when we get into the matter of cinema, please allow me to focus on one point that has nothing to do with nationalities and that has much to do with our staying “human” (carrying our human responsibilities without grandeur) and with making films. If we undergo the harsh experience of watching Pier Paolo Pasolini Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) – not one of my most beloved works of him as it lays unfortunately in the cul de sac of the figurative representation of an allegory – we can observe a power scheme at play through a Verfremdungseffekt built up thanks to a precise pictorial approach. This effect reduces the empathic process and we can observe the horror of the abyssal anarchy of power hidden under regulations, legal codes and conditions. If we survive these circles of hell, we land in a room where two soldiers are dancing. Two human beings recall the possibility of an open window towards a more tender dimension of life. This is the ambiguous room where we are asked to install ourselves nowadays, in order to carry the weight of our own present. In our historical period we are asked to tissue new threads between regulations, norms, institutions and social justice. Fifty years afterwards – in a society where anyhow everything is allowed to be visible – to linger nowadays in grotesque fantasies falls under the category of senseless mannerism. The decadency only reveals an excess of indifference, aggravated by a lack of visual distancing. To show in our films voyeurism, submission and dominance can only contribute to the repetition of these power dynamics. May cinema dare to dive into the folds of societies and institutions far beyond provocative surfaces. Sometimes, to be explicitely provocatory does not achieve any real problematization and sometimes the border between parody and propaganda is really thin i.e. through the use of the aesthetics of cruelty.
Politically:
I express my full support to all people acting non-violently and contributing to keep our eyes open on the inhuman conditions of civilians in Palestine. I join my voice to the claims of several government and non-government institutions to demand the execution of the arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu emanated by the International Criminal Court. To demand the allowance of transporting sufficient sanitary goods in Gaza. And to ask the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
No more words. Here I am to ask you to pick up one of these whistles and to whistle with me for a moment. I will not want to whistle against someone or something: I want to whistle for something. Here, at our windows, in our minds, at work, in the streets. And please, as well in this cinema, do feel free to whistle anytime, also during this projection, if you will feel you like: let us say it as an active live musical accompaniment of the film!
Be sure this film will keep on whistling too. - AM