by InTrieste
After a series of screenings dedicated to the International Critics’ Week, Venice Film Festival Days returns to Trieste’s Cinema Ariston with two special evenings focused on the Giornate degli Autori, an independent section of the Venice International Film Festival founded in 2004 by ANAC and 100autori and inspired by Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.
The initiative, organized by AGIS, ANEC and FICE delle Tre Venezie with support from the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, brings to theaters across the region a selection of films presented at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. The program offers audiences the opportunity to discover some of the most original and significant works in contemporary auteur cinema.
Dedicated to creative freedom and innovation, the Giornate degli Autori showcases films that explore the complexities of reality through personal perspectives and diverse cinematic languages. “In the selected works, we pursue life, construction, and relationship,” said artistic director Gaia Furrer. “Love becomes an act of rebellion; memory, a political gesture.”
The first screening at Cinema Ariston will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 4 at 9 p.m. with Memory (France/The Netherlands, 2025), directed by Vladlena Sandu and introduced by Daniele Terzoli of La Cappella Underground.
The film follows an intimate and haunting journey through fragments of the past, where personal memory intertwines with collective history. Viewed through the eyes of a child, it depicts the devastation of war with striking emotional force.
At age six, following her parents’ divorce, Sandu moved from Crimea to Grozny, unaware that war would soon engulf her childhood. As the Soviet Union collapsed and Chechnya fractured, Russian-speaking families fled while deported Chechens returned to reclaim their homeland.
Blending archival footage, diary-style videos and recreated scenes, the Ukrainian-born filmmaker revisits her childhood trauma in search of an answer to a lingering question: how can the cycle of violence passed down to children and transmitted across generations be broken? Memory becomes a universal meditation on loss, remembrance and the search for a voice through cinema.
The program continues on Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 9 p.m. with Past Future Continuous – The Birds of Mount Qaf (Iran, Norway, Italy, 2025), directed by Morteza Ahmadvand and Firouzeh Khosrovani.
This poetic and resonant work reflects on exile, memory and the enduring ties to places we can no longer return to.
Maryam fled Iran at age 20, hidden among a flock of sheep crossing the mountainous border into Turkey shortly after the revolution, as many of her activist friends were imprisoned or executed. Today living in the United States, she installs surveillance cameras in her parents’ Tehran home to continue observing the life she left behind. When the connection breaks, so does the fragile thread linking her to her origins.
In this lyrical film, technology becomes a tenuous bridge between past and present, a means of reclaiming — through dreams and longing — the people and places lost to time and history.
Screenings are free and open to the public until seats are filled.
A full program is available at agistriveneto.it.
