by InTrieste
The 24th edition of I Mille Occhi – International Festival of Cinema and the Arts will return to Trieste from September 12 to 17, 2025, offering a program that intertwines classic cinema, contemporary works, and cross-disciplinary explorations of art and literature.
This year’s poster, designed by illustrator Alessandro Baronciani, sets the tone for the festival. Known for his distinctive aesthetic, Baronciani has reimagined his style in a Hitchcockian mode, a nod to one of the program’s central themes.
The festival will open with a preview screening on September 1 at Trieste’s Casa del Cinema: Porte aperte (1990) by Gianni Amelio, adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s novel and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The screening will inaugurate the section “Una storia semplice? Leonardo Sciascia e il cinema,” which highlights adaptations and interpretations of Sciascia’s work by directors such as Elio Petri, Damiano Damiani, and Amelio, featuring performances from Gian Maria Volonté and Claudia Cardinale.
Founded by critic Sergio M. Grmek Germani and directed by Giulio Sangiorgio, the festival continues its tradition of juxtaposing film history with contemporary reflections. Germani curates the “carte blanche” program Young and Innocent: The Endless Cinema of the Greatest Filmmakers, a dialogue between Alfred Hitchcock, Jerry Lewis, Walt Disney, Carl Theodor Dreyer, John Ford, and Leo McCarey. The aim, Germani has noted, is to present “masterpieces that remain inexhaustible.”
The festival’s Premio Anno Uno, organized in collaboration with the Trieste Film Festival, will be awarded to Serbian director Želimir Žilnik. A retrospective will accompany the honor, culminating in the Italian premiere of his most recent film, Eighty Plus.
Other highlights include Kino Basaglia, a section revisiting the legacy of Franco Basaglia, the influential Trieste psychiatrist, through works by Marco Bellocchio, Frederick Wiseman, and Costanza Quatriglio. Tecnica Mista continues the festival’s engagement with Italian literature, presenting Virgilio Villoresi’s visionary Orfeo and a restoration of Pino Zac’s Il cavaliere insistente, inspired by Italo Calvino.
The program also features a focus on Armenian diaspora cinema, exploring themes of history and identity through films of diverse origins.
The competitive section Cinema sul Cinema encapsulates the festival’s ethos of reflecting on and reinterpreting the medium itself. Entries range from portraits of David Lynch and Éric Rohmer to a Filipino erotic film reimagined through artificial intelligence, and a project by Hungarian students reconstructing a lost silent film about Dracula.
Screenings will take place at Teatro Miela (September 12–14) and Cinema Ariston (September 15–17), with late-night events airing on RAI 3. True to its mission, I Mille Occhi positions cinema not as a consumer product but as a critical and communal experience that bridges past and present.
