David, red carpet and rage

Translated by Martina Marino

The Oscars are great. But can we talk about the David di Donatello?

Alongside Spain’s Goya Awards, Germany’s Lolas, and other major national ceremonies, the Italian prize still matters. It’s not a recognition that everyone, inside and outside national borders, immediately reads as an absolute mark of prestige. And yet, that is precisely where its importance lies: national awards are not just about handing out statuettes, but about reflecting the profile of an industry, a cultural sensibility, a production season. Looking at the Davids, the Goyas, or the Lolas means taking a close look at what a country has chosen to tell: which works it has rewarded, which names it has brought to the surface, which tensions it has allowed to emerge. For this reason, it is easier to navigate a few thousand titles—however many they may actually be—than an indistinct sea of hundreds of thousands.

In the case of the David di Donatello, this carries even more weight. Reading what gets nominated, what wins, and what manages to leave a mark on the Italian film season means confronting the real state of our cinema, not its caricature or the usual refrain: “in Italy, we’re no longer capable of making cinema.” So the point becomes simple: if we keep telling ourselves that Italian cinema is terrible, yet we don’t know the Davids, don’t follow the films that make it there, don’t know anything about what our industry actually produces, then perhaps the problem isn’t just the cinema. Perhaps we’re looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps we’re focusing our attention in the wrong place.

And that is precisely why the Davids matter more today than we tend to admit. Not only because they reward the best of Italian cinema, but because each edition becomes a barometer of the sector’s health. Those who step onto that stage, even when they exaggerate, carry far more than a single film with them: they carry the oxygen level of an entire production chain, its contradictions, its exclusions, its imbalances, its remaining capacity to still believe in itself.

In all of this, however, there is a problem. The images circulating in these hours, constructed as a stark and radical appeal, express it with a verbal violence that strikes precisely because it taps into a real unease. “We are not a colony, we are Italian culture,” reads the first.

Then comes the call for a dramatic gesture ahead of the 71st edition of the David di Donatello: to leave the hall empty, to turn silence into a public act, to transform the ceremony into a protest. At the heart of the j’accuse is a clear indictment: two years of policies deemed short-sighted, cuts to the Cinema Fund, reforms perceived as punitive for the national production fabric and, conversely, advantageous for major international productions, which in Italy find skilled labor, studios, and competitive costs.

The point is not to mechanically embrace the radicalism of the slogan. The point is to understand why that slogan resonates today. In a sector that has always oscillated between glamour and precarity, the fracture has become too visible to be concealed by ritual. The problem with Italian cinema is not a lack of talent, but the compression of the conditions that allow that talent to become work, continuity, trajectory, industry. It is the struggle of those who write, produce, act, edit, distribute, and promote, within a system that too often celebrates the exception while letting the foundation wither.

When a sector feels the need to say it is not a colony, it is first and foremost speaking about cultural sovereignty. It is saying that it is not enough to host prestigious sets, not enough to attract capital, not enough to turn Cinecittà into an efficient production machine, if Italian cinema—the one that should express an imagination, a language, a conflict, a form of the present—is left without air.

The issue is not being against international cinema. The issue is not sacrificing one’s own: what previous generations called “the last true Italian cinema,” and which, whether we like it or not, still runs through our veins. Because a national cinema is not measured only by its ability to welcome the world, but by its concrete ability to keep telling its own stories.

And this is where the discussion around the Davids becomes more interesting. A national award should serve precisely this purpose: to recognize the internal value of an ecosystem, to symbolically protect it, to grant it authority in the eyes of the public and institutions. If instead it risks becoming, in the eyes of a large part of the sector, a showcase disconnected from the material difficulties of those who actually make cinema, then the short circuit is clear.

Francesco Sossai is one of those names to hold onto. Until a few years ago, he was almost unknown to the general public; today he represents one of the trajectories that best shows how Italian cinema is still capable of generating vision, despite everything. The point is not to turn every emerging talent into a chosen one, but to recognize that beneath the surface of already canonized names there exists a living, restless, promising matter that simply needs time, space, and the right conditions to grow.

And this is where anger finds its deepest meaning. Not merely in protesting a ceremony, but in rejecting a toxic narrative: the one that claims Italian cinema is finished, emptied, irrelevant. It is not finished. It is under pressure. It is weakened. But it still exists. And it continues to produce works, personalities, and possibilities that deserve far better than national self-commiseration.

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