The awards

Documentaries

SHE

For giving a face and a voice to the women workers of one of Vietnam's largest electronics hubs, the anonymous labour behind the objects we use every day. Between the factory, the dormitories and their homes, the film builds a choral story of rare coherence, holding together rigorous investigation and emotional involvement without ever settling for formulaic denunciation.

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Short films

Beyond Silence

For telling, through spare staging and performances of great intensity, the impossibility of making one's voice heard after abuse. Two women of different generations, a shared trauma, two silences of different lengths: in seventeen minutes the film takes on a huge subject with a minimalism that gives nothing to rhetoric. Incisive, essential, powerful.

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Animation

Rukeli

For bringing back to light, in a few minutes of animation of extraordinary visual power, the story of Johann «Rukeli» Trollmann, the Sinti boxer and German champion whom Nazism stripped of his title, his family and his freedom. A work born from a workshop with young people from Scampia, which turns the memory of persecution into a tool for reading today's discrimination.

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Documentaries

Sea Sisters

For bringing two women and two distant seas into dialogue: Antonia, who wants to be a fisherwoman in Apulia in a community that will not recognise her as one, and Sandra, a Sámi captain in the Norwegian Arctic. Patient direction, built over years, that entrusts the light of the Mediterranean and the cold of the North with showing what freedom costs when the world is not ready to grant it.

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Short films

Un'occasione d'oro

For the confidence with which it turns a sun-scorched countryside into a place of fairy tale and deceit: three boys, a hole, a gold chain to be buried so that a tree will grow from it. Direction that handles timing, landscape and its young performers with a steady hand, and tells of trust and its betrayal without a word too many.

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Animation

Timosha

For the delicacy with which it entrusts a story against war to drawing, choosing simplicity and gentleness where it would have been easy to raise its voice. Direction that knows restraint, builds emotion with a few strokes and shows how animation can speak of what wounds without ever losing tenderness.

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Documentaries

I sogni del vicolo

For following, for two years, from 2023 to 2025, the kids of Vico San Mandato in Naples: fourteen-year-olds raising money to decorate their alley for the league title, whom we find, soon after, already dealing with work and adult life. An attentive, welcoming gaze on a youth that holds on through the simplicity of friendship and the warmth of football fandom, and turns the alley into a community.

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Short films

The Sense of Earth

For giving back dignity and memory to a life that the news would have reduced to a number. A handful of earth in the pocket of a young migrant who died becomes, through the meeting of live action and animation, the story of his journey and of his return to his mother. A work that asks the viewer to recognise a person, and to feel responsible for them.

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Animation

Una rosa

For composing, with its author's unmistakable line, a poem of love and struggle dedicated to the Palestinian people. Five minutes in which the drawing and the voices of Valerio Mastandrea and Wasim Dahmash become a gesture of closeness: cinema as an act of care towards a wounded community, and as an invitation not to look away.

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The Sense of Earth

To Simone Massi and Alessandro Ingaria, who in The Sense of Earth turn a bag of earth found in the pocket of a boy who died at sea into the threshold for crossing his whole migrant journey, in a hand-drawn dream. They give back a name and a story to those the sea leaves without either. For turning a true detail into an act of peace.

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I am Tejimola

For its extraordinary ability to blend technical experimentation with a solid narrative structure, creating a unique and original aesthetic. The work addresses complex and urgent themes such as gender fluidity, the exploration of the body and its transformations with delicacy and sensitivity, drawing strength and inspiration from ancient traditional legends.

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Un'occasione d'oro

For the effectiveness with which the cinematography turns the swindle suffered by the protagonist into an unforgettable visual mirage. Through its use of colour, the film tells the story of a naive boy pushed by two jackals to bury a gold chain in a barren field, in the false hope of seeing a tree of wealth grow. The contrast between the dust and the glow of the gold is not only aesthetic: it makes the greed of the deceit understood, leading the viewer towards a surprising and poetic final revenge of the boy's illusions.

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Ensemble

The documentary struck us for its ability to tell the daily life of a reception centre for unaccompanied foreign minors without reducing people to their migration stories.

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Beyond Silence

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Franco Ricciardi

To celebrate the extraordinary ability of his music to become visual and social storytelling, giving a voice to the stories, the redemptions and the souls that bring the territory and its community to life. The award honours an artistic path always rooted in popular identity yet constantly open to new languages, in perfect tune with the festival's commitment to works that can generate social impact and redemption through art.

Francesco Di Leva