There are moments when current events accelerate so startlingly that they make History before our very eyes. This 2026 may just be that year, remembered in the decades to come as a year of epoch-making transformation, a turning point, marked by technological, ecological, and social changes so radical that they might redefine the very outlines of our human experience.

In the face of these transformations, the risk today is for our gazes to become so numb that they refuse to comprehend what is happening, grasping at the illusion that we are but passive witnesses to a crumbling world on the brink of collapse, submerged in an unstoppable flood of images that end up paradoxically obscuring reality rather than revealing it. If cinema wishes to preserve its civil as well as its aesthetic function, it has a duty to pierce that veil, forcing us to actually look at the present. We must not forget the ethical lesson of Neorealism, which, among the ruins of a post-war world, rejected escapism and stood on the front lines in rebuilding our national identity, crafting images imbued with the values of anti-fascism. Today, even such principles have been turned upside down: those who appropriate the language of video games and action cinema, employing images modelled on the aesthetics of entertainment in order to circulate war “trailers”, aestheticising the geopolitics of terror, or those who generate fake images with the precise intent of falsifying reality, are moving in the wrong direction with respect to the quest for truth that inspired Neorealism.

In these circumstances, curating a festival programme is an act of great responsibility. A festival is not a neutral bubble: asserting our cultural activism by deciding which films to showcase and which to exclude, means considering the act of selection a Godardian feat: making a political decision, just as films “are meant to be made politically”. That does not mean succumbing to content-driven narratives: linguistic, formal, artistic research will always be our priority. But, as Wim Wenders mentioned in his 1991 essay The Logic of Image – several years ahead of his famous about-turn at the last Berlinale – “every film is political”.

I am called upon to thank our selection committee – Matteo Berardini, Marianna Cappi, Francesco Grieco, Marco Romagna  – for embracing my stance while sifting through the over 700 submissions we received, and the over 300 Italian short films. The programme of the 2026 edition is making a clear statement, with its plurality of origins already charting a possible course forward. From faraway lands to a rapidly-changing Italy, an atlas of real-world geographies and virtual spaces reminds us that different stories are possible. Original voices capable of capturing the tensions and disorientation of the present, skillfully processing the weight of the past, and translating these moods into new images.

Whilst the industry at large is grappling with its crises, these works are proof that cinema never stopped asserting its own cruciality, rejecting a preordained conformity of its canons to rediscover the thrill of risk-taking and an ardent faith in the power of storytelling. This cinema is fierce and independent, daring and vibrant, resolute in its reminder that our collective imagination can, and indeed must, continue to be rewritten.

Beatrice Fiorentino
Artistic Director Settimana Internazionale della Critica