Voice of the verb ‘to resist’
edition 2025, October–November
The new edition of the film festival, which this time also includes a book presentation, opens with the screening of Cristian Tomassini’s film Brenta connection, winner of the 2025 Edera Film Festival Special Prize “Changing Landscapes”, an award given by the Benetton Foundation to a work that is particularly significant in terms of the theme of landscape, in its continuous evolution, and for its focus on the relationship between people and communities and their living environments.
In an original way and with unexpected language, Tomassini’s first feature film depicts a region in all its contradictions, showing its tensions and misery but also offering glimpses of fragments of wild nature that resist, just as the bizarre characters try to resist in their own way — the bizarre characters who, on a summer night, wander through landscapes of water and warehouses, involved in a surreal and absurd story, incredibly inspired by a true event (Brenta connection).
They resist land management imposed from above and perceived as impacting their (our?) landscapes, the hundreds of people who in 2024 walked almost 200 kilometres, from the Vanoi valley to Venice, to give voice to an entire threatened ecosystem and deliver to the Veneto Region the 13,000 signatures collected against the construction of a dam in Val Cortella, one of the last wild valleys in the Alps. Like them, all citizens who see the Grave del Piave di Ciano del Montello as a natural area as precious as it is fragile, of which we are heirs and custodians, whose importance should exceed any economic calculation and “does not allow for unambiguous and purely technical management solutions”, are resisting (In cammino per l’acqua, Acque contese).
Finally, resistance is the word we bow to every day, the word that marked the lives of Antonio Giuriolo, anti-fascist intellectual and partisan, master of critical thinking (La religione della libertà), and Mario Rigoni Stern who, thanks to the physical and mental resilience of a child who grew up in the mountains, survived imprisonment in German concentration camps, later managing to recount all the horror and pain of war, giving voice to his comrades and friends, those lost and those found, and their stories. (Ritratti. Mario Rigoni Stern). (SZ)
