While the title and theme of our XVI issue is a tribute to Umberto Eco, its format is inspired by Mark Cousins' manifesto for a 'fantasy' festival, described by the Irish director and documentary filmmaker in 2020.

The film festival of his dreams: one hundred films, no red carpet, no VIP area and films chosen by economist Amartya Sen and country singer Dolly Parton. And projected onto their bedsheets.

According to Cousins, in a more recent interview published by our blog in 2022, most film festivals are pretty similar, pretty stereotypical. A film festival should instead be a creative event. It's not enough to just pick the movies, put them on a schedule, and pick the guests. We need to innovate the form.

Again according to Cousins “At festivals, 'high' culture and 'low' culture should coexist. They should be super accessible to uneducated people. One should not be afraid of children. One should not be afraid of melodrama. We should mix everything with the internet and innovation, in order to become accessible to all and spread an understandable message.”

“In too many film festivals, you buy your ticket online, show up, there's a guest, there's an introduction, there's a debate, Q&A sessions, and then you go out. And the next audience comes in. We need to change this structure. We have to imagine that we are data artists, punks. That's why Tilda Swinton and I took a cinema lorry through the Scottish Highlands and brought it into local communities: because it had never been done before. I think many festivals have lost the sense of play and childhood.”

“Organizing a film festival is like making a film. First of all, you create a world, just like Steven Spielberg did. The festival must have its own specific atmosphere and a key element is the location.”

An event every day of the festival, personally conducted by an artistic direction composed by two protagonists of the Sardinian scene.

Another important suggestion came from Neil McGlone, film critic and film festival organiser in the UK. Neil has been organizing a festival in Sussex for years where great emphasis is given to entertainment. How do you get the public back in cinemas? According to Neil, an element of entertainment is needed to get people out of their homes – and this shouldn't be perceived as a compromise, on the contrary. This is exactly what we are offering to the audience of our festival this year.

And finally, inspiration for the development of our theme came from a sentence by Giorgio Manganelli:

“A museum is made up of unique objects. Each example is a prey, unearthed, excavated, stolen, corrupted, exchanged, stolen”.

A large collection of unique items. Each fictional film, documentary, mockumentary, animation, important reference work or first attempt by an adolescent author, is a unique object, a cultural product with its own poetics that we respect.

This is why we have tried to create an event characterized by great ecosystem diversity, diversity of products and processes. And the hunt for the artifact, for the object, for the book, for the painting, is the privileged theme of heist movies. Why libraries? Because even books are museum objects. Let's think of a paper index of subjects. Hence the great mass of books, objects, traces, collections, blobs. And as historian Carlo Ginzburg points out, quoting Aby Warburg in one of the scheduled documentaries, "the book you need is next to the one you are looking for".