Cinema is back in Sora (FR) thanks to the Dream Warriors
“Dentro/fuori”, a documentary that tells the personal tale of young people during the pandemic, was presented to the residents of Sora, in the Lazio province of Frosinone, on 17 July 2022. The film was produced by local secondary school students and directed by Guido Massimo Calanca within the scope of the project “Cinema e Scuola. Visioni Fuori Luogo” promoted by Italy’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture and Tourism in collaboration with association CinemAvvenire.
When she talks about these students, educator Angela Bianchi calls them “the new Dream Warriors”, a reference to the team from Da Vinci Secondary School that took part in the educational programme A Scuola di OpenCoesione (ASOC) during the 2015-2016 school year. “It’s a sort of passing of the baton. All these students are now ‘active citizens’ and true ‘Dream Warriors’,” Bianchi said.
But let’s take a step back. In 2015, Sora, the hometown of Vittorio De Sica, one of Italy’s most influential film directors, had no functioning movie theatre because the existing one had not been included in the ongoing process of digitalisation. “It was a scar on the territory,” said Bianchi, who, together with her Dream Warriors, had decided to tackle the problem by taking on a project of civic monitoring focused on the movie theatre of a nearby town, Isola Liri within the scope of ASOC 2015-2016.
But these fourth-year students didn’t want to stop at monitoring and decided to take action. When the City of Sora came knocking on their door in September 2016, they were hoping the students could help answer a call for tenders of the Region of Lazio to promote the theatre, and the Dream Warriors, along with CinemAvvenire and Ms Bianchi, submitted a proposal and were awarded the contract, which also drew the support of the Academy of Italian Cinema.
And so it was that, for the first time, a film festival came to Sora (FR), attended by Italian actors and directors including Matteo Rovere, Paolo Virzì, Edoardo Leo, Stefano Fresi, and Valerio Mastandrea. “We wrote emails in which we told them we needed the support of the film world to raise awareness in the city about what we were doing,” said Bianchi, who now heads a secondary school in Rome but continues to work with the Dream Warriors. The students introduced the films and interviewed the actors and directors on stage. “From that moment on, they had become promoters of culture in the city,” she added.
In 2017, the students worked with the City of Sora to organise the event Cinema sotto le stelle (Cinema under the stars), and between 2017 and 2018 they also organised two courses at school on cinematography and film editing together with Tiziano Rea and with Andrea De Sica, grandson of Vittorio De Sica. In 2019, the presented the project Back to Dream to the Region of Lazio and, in December of that year, organised yet another film festival in Sora.
“In 2017, using waste materials from a local mattress manufacturer, the students created a movie theatre in one of the school’s classrooms. But they needed a screen and a projector, which another class was able to purchase by taking second place in the video contest “Un’idea di classe” organised by the Region of Lazio. The school’s movie theatre is currently the only one in the city,” Bianchi said.
Alessio Porretta, one of the Dream Warriors who now studies Architecture at the University of Florence, said, “The civic monitoring that we did opened up a world that gave us the chance to bring cinema back to the city.” It was Alessio who designed the team’s logo, #cinevolution, a nod to the Dream Warriors’ aspirations to help cinema evolve. “It was important for me to push myself and develop my creative side, and it’s an experience that I have brought with me to university. When we left, we passed the baton to the class behind us, helping them to become the new Dream Warriors.”
Ludovica Francesconi, one of Alessio’s classmates, said, “To see films in a movie theatre, we had to go to Frosinone, which is a 40-minute drive, an impossible undertaking for a kid.”
Today, Ludovica is a professional actor and recognises the importance of her experience with the Dream Warriors to her training. “For me, it was a great opportunity. I wanted to be an actor, but living in a small town and going to secondary school, it was hard for me to see how to go about it. It was good for me to meet the actors and directors, to talk to them and get to know what this job was really like. It was essential to my career.”
Her experience with the Dream Warriors also helped Ludovica to understand the great power of cinema in bringinig people together, as they saw when they organised the festival and the town rushed to see the films and meet the celebrities. “That was when I understood the power of this visual medium,” Ludovica said.
The spark of cinema remains in Sora thanks to the Dream Warriors and their dream that continues to become reality, all made possible by ASOC and the passion of these students and their teacher.
