Cinemadamare (Foiano di Val Fortore stop)

Cinemadamare arrives in the Benevento Fortore

From June 23 to 29, 2025, Foiano di Val Fortore, a municipality of about 1,400 residents in the province of Benevento, Campania, hosted a stop of Cinemadamare, the international gathering of young filmmakers founded and directed by TgLa7 journalist Franco Rina. For a week, the Sannio village, perched at about 520 meters above sea level on the hills sloping down toward the Fortore river, turned into a lively open-air film set.

What is Cinemadamare

Cinemadamare is not a traditional festival with red carpets and gala evenings: it is an itinerant film campus and a production hub. Since 2003, it has traveled across Italy during the summer months, moving from village to village week by week, and concludes its journey in Venice to coincide with the Venice International Film Festival. Every summer, it welcomes young filmmakers, film students, and professionals who work side-by-side on all stages of production—script development, location scouting, filming, and editing—with free participation for those selected. The organization is managed by the Associazione Culturale CinemadaMare, based in Rome.

How a stop works

The mechanism is always the same and explains why every host town experiences such intense days:

• Weekly competition: participants, divided into crews, write, shoot, and edit a short film throughout the week, using the streets, squares, and landscapes of the host municipality as their set.
• Free afternoon workshops dedicated to directing, screenwriting, cinematography, acting, and editing.
• Masterclasses with directors, actors, producers, and technicians invited by the organization.
• Evening screenings open to the public, featuring the best films produced by Cinemadamare and the works created on-site.
• Awards ceremonies and special events tailored to the opportunities offered by the local area.

The 2025 stop and the San Giovanni feast

In Foiano di Val Fortore, the Cinemadamare week was scheduled to coincide with the patronal feast of San Giovanni, the most attended moment of the year for the local community: the days when the town fills with families returning for the summer and emigrants coming back to their village of origin. The overlap had a precise purpose: to bring young filmmakers' cameras into an authentic celebration, amidst processions, marching bands, illuminations, and fireworks, while offering residents an additional cultural program. The initiative was announced with enthusiasm by Mayor Giuseppe Antonio Ruggiero and included free workshops, masterclasses with industry professionals, and evening screenings in the municipal theater.

A village that becomes a location

For a municipality of this size, hosting an international campus is not just a spectacle: it is a way to have the landscape told by those seeing it for the first time. The stone houses of the historic center, the steep alleys, the scattered districts—Frassineta, Ponte Carboniera, Serra Verdito—and the fields of the Fortore become natural backdrops for short stories that then circulate in festivals and on platforms. This is the logic Cinemadamare has applied for over twenty years in small Italian towns, many of which are marked by depopulation: cinema as a tool for territorial promotion, at low costs and with an image impact that lasts well beyond the week of filming.

The 2026 edition

The 2026 Cinemadamare tour, which started on June 26 in Fiuggi and includes a dozen stops across Lazio, Abruzzo, Puglia, Calabria, Liguria, Basilicata, Sicily, Lombardy, Spain, and France, does not include Foiano di Val Fortore. As it is an itinerant event, a visit to a municipality does not imply an annual return: the 2025 Foiano stop therefore remains, for the moment, a unique experience, pending news on whether the village will return to the calendar in future editions. Those looking for Cinemadamare cinema in Campania should check the official tour page every spring, which is published with the final stops a few weeks before departure.

What to see in the surroundings

Foiano di Val Fortore is located in the extreme northeast of the province of Benevento, near the border with Puglia and Molise, in one of the greenest and least-traveled areas of inland Campania. It is a convenient starting point to discover the Val Fortore—San Bartolomeo in Galdo, Baselice, Montefalcone di Val Fortore—among woods, windy ridges, pastures, and a rustic cuisine of fresh pasta, cheeses, and cured meats.