Ortigia Film Festival

2009 – 2018: this year the Ortigia Film Festival (OFF) celebrates its 10th anniversary, becoming Syracuse’s second longest-lasting cultural event after Inda Foundation’s classic plays at the Ancient Theatre. An ever-growing trend, thanks to the more than 20,000 people who, in 2017 alone, have overall filled the event venues.

For ten years, through the Sa.Li.Ro’ cultural association, the OFF has turned the spotlight on the island of Ortygia, part of Unesco’s World Heritage, highlighting its incomparable cultural gems and creating pedestrian-only film paths, paying special attention to eliminating human, physical, as well as psychic barriers. A combination of architectural beauty, tourism, new talents, a jury, actors and artists: energies coming together and mixing up with the audience, ultimately creating a magic cultural salon.

Over the course of time, the Ortigia Film Festival has established itself as one of the most important appointments in Sicily’s festival calendar: an important achievement, which will be reflected in the rich, innovative and finely structured programme of this upcoming 2018 edition, showcasing several films from the national and international movie scene.
The goal of the Festival is to select high-level cultural films that may not enjoy the mainstream promotion or the commercial appeal they deserve, and offer them to the general public in Syracuse’s most beautiful piazzas.

The core festival competitions are as follows: long feature films, first and second Italian films, and International short feature films. Yet the Festival is also the backdrop for documentaries, retrospectives, premieres, tributes to great film-makers, recently made films, unreleased films directed by emerging film-makers, special focuses, masterpieces in film history, workshops, meetings with the film-makers and other side events. In the course of the last 10 years, we have had the privilege of being sponsored by and of collaborating with: Unesco, MiBACT (Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage), SIAE (Italy’s copyright collecting agency), Sicily’s Regional Authority for Culture, Performance Arts and Sport,Special Dept for Cinema and Audiovisuals, Sensi Contemporanei, Sicilia Film Commission, Municipality of Syracuse, Expo 2015, Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Cineteca di Bologna, Emergency, and others. The island of Ortygia is the ideal place to spend a week of holidays and culture, while enjoying the Festival: this is the place where, for a whole week in the last ten summer seasons, locals, tourists and artists have converged, creating an opportunity to meet and share experiences, while reviving the neighbourhood and the whole town. It is a location, but also has an identity: the Ortigia Film Festival.

Ortigia Film Festival

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