Much like the little Gaulish village in *Asterix and Obelix* (we’re feeling particularly drawn to comics this year), our festival is trying to resist the invasion of junk images – whether real or artificial – that seek to take over our imagination. That’s why we’re giving space to a cinema on a human scale, which also delves deeply into the images of the past a key to understanding the present, or perhaps even a sign of hope for the future. The common thread running through many of the works in the twelfth edition of the PerSo Festival is, in fact, that of the memory: ‘Don’t miss the last survivors – both victims and perpetrators – of the Holocaust’ – for eleven years, this was the obsession of Claude Lanzmann; and on the occasion of a moving documentary in the competition, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Shoah, we will be screening the uncut version of his monumental work over six days. Also as part of the PerSo Award, we have another ‘epic film’, based on an exceptional discovery of film reels made by students at an Argentine film school that was active before and at the start of the dictatorship. Even the most poetic or experimental works, such as the three Italian entries in the competition, interweave images of the past with those of the present to reconstruct family relationships – even in their most unsettling and painful aspects – or the inner motivations of four fighters on the Republican front during the Spanish Civil War. In the side events, marking these anniversaries, we honour the memory of two key figures in our country’s cultural history: Dario Fo (centenary of their birth) with the screening of an interview with the Fo/Rame duo about one of their shows, and Andrea Pazienza (the seventieth, the latter taking place as part of the exhibition and market organised by Ma Project in the cloister of the Méliès cinema) with the documentary dedicated to him Stefano Mordini, and a gathering of contemporary comic book authors and experts.

The journey into the more recent past, on the other hand, takes place through the retrospective dedicated to Carlo Cresto Dina: the producer, amongst many others, of all the films by Alice Rohrwacher and Leonardo Di Costanzo, who has also been involved in documentary filmmaking for many years. Visitors will have the chance to rediscover the films produced during his time at Fandango – now virtually impossible to find – which depict Italy at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s; and also to pay tribute to the director Enrica Colusso, who passed away recently, with one of her films on the trafficking of women from Eastern Europe, which was funded and then censored by RAI, which never broadcast it.

Of course, PerSo is not solely focused on the past: alongside the selection of works in Virtual Reality, which has been an integral part of our programme for the past four years, will see the debut of a showcase dedicated to short films made using Intelligenza Artificiale generativa, scelti per la loro capacità di raccontare il reale e affrontare temi sociali. Pensare al futuro significa anche voler coltivare un nuovo pubblico: un lavoro che il PerSo pratica tutto l’anno, organizzando workshops and events for schools and Casa Circondariale di Perugia-Capanne. Training activities that pave the way for the formation of our student and female prisoner juries. Indeed, every year the festival attracts an ever-increasing number of students passionate about cinema that reflects reality: so much so that a group of young men and women from last year’s university jury chose to join this year’s film selection committee.

For the last edition of PerSo, we chose as the festival’s image the moment just before a young couple kiss, during a demonstration on 8 March 1976. We wanted to convey a message of hope within a context of active politics, as embodied by that still taken from footage of a documentary by Ugo Gregoretti. This year – once again with the creative collaboration of the Studio Archis of Perugia – the image is more unsettling: a photomontage of several stills, all taken from our opening film. They are fragments of the face of a very young Afghan artist, a refugee in Iran, who is trying to reach her mother in Europe, but between one attempt and the next is forced to face extremely gruelling trials. Yet there is a glimmer of light in this image: a birthday candle (for her sixteenth birthday) which the artist holds alight in her hands. Throughout her odyssey, in fact, the protagonist of this film finds, through art, the strength to keep fighting.

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