Religion Today Film Festival, the film festival on spirituality and interreligious dialogue returns from Wednesday, September 13 to Wednesday, September 20. The theme of the XXVI edition is "Community".
Born in 1997 as a pioneer of spiritual and interreligious cinema in Italy, this cultural event offers every year the opportunity to reflect on its evolution and its role in society.
Over the years, the Festival has traced a remarkable path, creating a universal link with religious cinema, which is now recognized and admired everywhere. It does not merely present films, but proposes a journey capable of uniting minds, ideas, creeds and visions.
It also offers a fascinating and unprecedented vision of Trentino. A region historically linked to the Council, today increasingly a land of encounter and interreligious dialogue, bearer of a message of solidarity and peace.
A frontier land that, thanks to the memory of the Tridentine Council and the traumatic experiences of the great wars of the twentieth century, has been able to reinvent itself as a place of welcome and dialogue, where research, economic development, attention to the environment and the new generations make it one of the regions with the highest level of well-being and standard of living in Italy.
The XXVI edition of the Festival aims to deepen the concept of community by linking it to the concept of community (also digital) so dear to young people.
A community that we can define - say the promoters - as "rediscovered" after the difficult years of the pandemic, that has shown great solidarity and courage, that has not disintegrated into selfish individualism but has been able to rediscover meaning and values without leaving anyone behind.
At the same pace has developed in recent years, thanks in part to the explosion of social networks, the digital community, a community that is difficult to define and frame within boundaries that are, on the contrary, blurred and permeable. Everyone has experienced belonging to one or more digital communities.
The virtual connection was the only contact many had with their loved ones. Festivals also had to significantly rethink how to engage their audiences through digital channels. Many of them discovered the value of creating engaging, live digital experiences that brought together people and young people from all over the world.
Communities of the faithful have also reorganized themselves to keep their worship services and rituals alive through live streaming, digital platforms and videoconferencing. Digital streaming platforms have saved the cinema, and "the challenge today is to bring people back to the darkness of the theaters for a communal and sharing experience like live cinema."
Rediscover the wonder of a spiritual, sensory and cultural experience. At the same time, because there is no faith without wonder. To remember the words with which the Pope Francis addressed the members of the Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo last February: "A world tormented by war and so many other evils needs signs, works that arouse wonder, that reveal the wonder of God, who never ceases to love his creatures and to be amazed by their beauty. In an increasingly artificial world, where man has surrounded himself with the works of his own hands, the great risk is that of losing wonder".
