The Lucania Film Festival is the first international film festival born in Basilicata, held every year in Pisticci – Matera in August. It’s a project for the promotion, dissemination, and education of cinema, aiming to promote the knowledge and enjoyment of audiovisual media in all its forms. In its 25 years of history, the LFF has grown enormously, earning itself an important artistic and social position in the international cinema festival scene. As a “festival of people and places,” the LFF is characterized by an intimate and confidential atmosphere between the audience and industry professionals who come from all over the world to the open-air cinemas of Pisticci, in the equipped spaces of the CineParco Tilt. Cinematically, the festival is recognized for the extremely high quality of the thousands of national and international film works.
As the brand states, the LFF is “a Festival of people and places,” a community project that involves all the main community actors. And every year, in the heart of the Lucanian summer, places transform into open-air cinemas where the magic of cinema unfolds, in a unique and familiar atmosphere considered one of the main elements of originality, thus distinguishing the LFF from other national and international festivals. This atmosphere consists of a series of elements well recognized by the audience, including easy access, proximity to directors and actors, and high attendance of young people and children. This gives the LFF a disseminating and educational function, which manages to bring even a non-expert audience closer to cinema, proving to be a unique opportunity for broadening the cultural horizons of the local community and connecting with other worlds and cultures, even distant ones. For this reason, to its attendees, the LFF is an experience of well-being that offers the possibility of spending a cultural stay in a territory capable of providing a rich tourist offer in a winning mix of cultural events, food and wine, art, history, entertainment, environment, and territory. Since 2016, the LFF has taken place in CinePeriferia at the CineParco Tilt.
One of the objectives of the LFF is to increase the presence of guests, not only during the event days but throughout the year, thanks to the numerous activities carried out within TILT, the regional Creativity center of Pisticci, managed by the LFF factory itself: film education with schools; self-financed film courses; transdisciplinary promotion projects: cinema and literature, cinema and food, cinema and cultural marketing, etc. All this makes the LFF a successful synthesis of two of the sectors experiencing strong growth in Basilicata, namely cultural tourism and, above all, cinema as an industry with great development potential and strong expansion in the region.