Ischia Film Festival 2025 – Location Denied is the focus on the urgency of human rights and the rediscovery of forgotten places

“Cinema is made of places and spaces to be experienced – explains Michelangelo Messina, artistic director of the Ischia Film Festival – but it has also always been an essential container for developing reflections and analyses on the main critical issues of our society and our lives". With these words, Messina introduces Location Denied, a collateral but central section in the festival's philosophy: a narrative space dedicated to marginal gazes, forgotten environments, and invisible places in our social geographies.

Short Films: Childhood and Adolescence Beyond the Visible

Seven short films in competition this year, united by a transversal theme: childhood and adolescence lived in spaces of discomfort and uncertainty. Settings that become part of the story itself, projecting the young protagonists into harsh, often ruthless contexts.

From Subways to Rubble: Tales of Survival

In Lima, Giulia Bettaglio’s first work, the Milan subway becomes the scene of a fight for survival. In Amusement Park by Egidio Prudenzano, the abandoned construction sites of China are transformed into symbols of emptiness and disillusionment. The same wounds are found in Clear Sky by Polish Marcin Kundera, among rubble and war trauma, and in Ya Hanouni, where the conflict enters homes without warning, devastating lives and futures.

Visual journeys between closed spaces and broken horizons

In Jin Hongde’s Neverland, a restless visual atlas takes shape between dream and desperation, while Perla Geagea’s The Past Is Calling tackles domestic violence in a claustrophobic crescendo. Closed spaces, both physical and mental, become the very essence of the story.

Feature films: between civil commitment and collective memory

The selection of seven feature films amplifies the festival's gaze: films that combine form and content, style and denunciation. Works that traverse history, politics and contemporaneity, giving voice to new forms of social narration.

Italian Works: Gaza and Sicily, Borders of Our Time

A Man Fell by Giovanni C. Lorusso takes the viewer to the Gaza Hospital in Sabra, among the ruins of memory and illusions of the future. In Spiaggia di vetro by Will Geiger, Sicily confirms itself as a land of passage and suspension, a mirror of the migratory dynamics that cross Europe.

Borders and migrations: the view widens

Silent Trees by Agnieszka Zwiefka tells the story of a fragile adolescence along the border between Poland and Belarus, while *Oceania* addresses the climate emergency and environmental exiles through the story of islands at risk of disappearing.

Aesthetics, Memory and Resistance: Visions from the World

Montenegro's Nikola Vukcevic, with Obraz, offers an epic tale with a strong humanistic impact. In Prison Beauty Contest, Bosnian Sdran Sarenac reflects on aesthetics and detention, transforming a beauty contest into an existential metaphor. The festival closes with Por tu bien by Argentine Axel Monsù, between rituality and a possible female and social redemption.

A Human Atlas Between Distance and Emotional Proximity

The films in competition build a heterogeneous, emotionally cohesive atlas that crosses geographies and conflicts with a human and involved gaze. Each work tells a story, but also a time, a collective tension, a universal urgency of understanding and solidarity.

Ischia Film Festival 2025: an appointment between cinema and reality

The twenty-third edition of the Ischia Film Festival will be held from June 28 to July 5, in the evocative setting of the Aragonese Castle of Ischia. Under the direction of Michelangelo Messina, the festival is supported by MiC – Directorate General Cinema and Audiovisual, Campania Region, Film Commission Campania Region, BONACINA, BPER Banca, TRECCANI Esperienze and ViVeTech.