The concept of the festival is a defining feature of Linea d’Ombra, which has always sought keywords to describe cinema as a classical yet modern art form with the power to influence reality.

In recent years, we have chosen ambitious themes for the latest editions of the festival. With ‘Crisis’ (2020), we confronted the instability of the present; with ‘Tomorrow’ (2021), we tried to imagine the future; and with ‘Conflicts’ (2022), we explored the tensions that run through our everyday lives. We then expressed the urgency of making conscious choices to promote positive change with ‘Cha(lle)nge’ (2023).

Ultimately, all these issues converge at an essential and inescapable junction: the issue of rights. It is here that we must start again. ‘Diritti/Rights’ remains the theme of the 2024 edition of the festival, as it did for the XXX edition.

Rights, someone has written, are like air, we only become aware of them when we begin to lack them, or, perhaps, when it is too late to remedy them. Even in this 2025 it is still rights that are being questioned, rarely to be rethought in relation to new social emergencies, more often to be restricted if not denied.

Of all the rights that are the foundation of any society that wants to call itself and think of itself as democratic, we want, this year, to focus on the right to know, to be understood in a broad sense. Our Constitutional Charter emphasises this, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights reaffirms it, and the need to provide quality education for all appears among the objectives of the European Agenda 2023.

Never as today is it to knowledge, to culture, that we will have to appeal in order to correct our way of dealing with nature, with the environment, using it and not despoiling it, and to education we must strongly ask to remove the obstacles that prevent many from accessing beauty and art. And we strongly believe that we will have to appeal to the mobilisation of culture to hope for peace, because the sharing of knowledge is a powerful bond even between diversities.

Welcome to the 30th edition of the Linea d’Ombra Festival!