The second edition of Carta Bianca. Storie orali e visuali dei festival cinematografici (lit. ‘Carte blanche. Oral and visual histories of film festivals’) will take place on several days between October 4 and December 13. The opening day will be dedicated to the Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival, a historic festival commenced during the Cold War that survived attacks from both politics and the world of film critics. The Berlinale’s art director Carlo Chatrian, at his last year of tenure, will participate in a round table with the curators of Carta Bianca. The second and third days of the programme will be dedicated to two ‘minor’ festivals which turned their niche programme into their trademark: amateur cinema that becomes art and archive film in the case of Archivio Aperto di Bologna (October 25, guest discussant Sergio Fant) and queer cinema, the theme of the Turin Lovers Film Festival, initiated in 1986 under the inflammatory title of Sodom to Hollywood (November 8, guest discussant Vladimir Luxuria).

Closing the programme are two very innovative themed festivals: the Trieste Film Festival with its focus on Central-Eastern European cinema (November 29, guest discussant Nicoletta Romeo) and the Festival dei Popoli, in Florence, a historical appointment for social, political, anthropological documentary enthusiasts (December 13, guest discussant Alessandro Stellino). Each meeting will be held at Cinema Rossini in Venice in the late afternoon. The meetings will comprise a debate by scholars and film critics and the screening of a film representative of the film festival that is being discussed. This year’s authors range from Maria Schrader to Werner Herzog, from Cristian Mungiu to Horacio Alcalá to Duccio Chiarini—which affirm how much festivals are the place where filmmakers meet filmviewers. The five feature films in programme are rare gems and quite intriguing for an audience of students, cinephiles, and film festival lovers.