INVOLVED! MovieLab for Sustainable ChangeMakers
Sguardi sul reale. Cinema della realtà is a series of films curated by The Human Safety Net and dedicated to cinema that generates impact, offering food for thought and creating awareness, empathy, and shared responsibility around the themes of social inclusion. Cinema that does not merely represent, but raises questions, invites viewers to share perspectives, and restores dignity to stories.
The festival, which is part of the INVOLVED! InnovationLab for Sustainable ChangeMakers project, is curated by Francesco della Puppa, professor of sociology at Ca' Foscari University in Venice, who explains the meaning of the project: "Looking at reality today is already a revolutionary act. With this festival, we want to build, vision after vision, a community that observes, questions, and feels. It is an invitation to live in the present with attention, to rediscover the responsibility of seeing and the power of listening."
The festival presents works that come from the grassroots, often together with the protagonists themselves. It is not cinema that looks from afar, but that gets close, participates, and shares.
The films selected do not pursue objectivity, but complexity: they highlight margins, invisible everyday life, conflicts, and collective transformations. They recount the present through ordinary lives, global conflicts, and shared intimacy.
The works touch on some of the central issues of our time: migration, poverty, rights, work, memory, families, territories. They narrate personal stories that become universal, individual experiences that lead to processes of identification and collective reflection. There are no easy answers, but questions that help us to better understand the reality we live in.
After each screening, there is an opportunity for dialogue with directors, authors, protagonists, scholars, experts, critics, social workers, but above all with the audience. The debate is an integral part of the experience: a moment to build new perspectives on the present together, to understand how cinema can become a tool for participation, care, and restitution.
