Evò ce Esù Visioni – Minority Language Film Festival

A film festival for hidden languages

Evò ce Esù Visioni is a film festival dedicated to minority languages that brings the Parco Turistico Culturale Palmieri in Martignano—a small town in the Province of Lecce, Puglia—to life every September. The title, in the Grico language, means "you and me" and perfectly captures the spirit of the event: a border encounter "between faces and dialects," as the festival's historic subtitle suggests. Established in 2015, it is currently the only event in Puglia entirely focused on cinema produced in minority languages.

Martignano and Grecìa Salentina

Martignano is part of Grecìa Salentina, the area of Salento where Grico, an ancient language of Greek origin, still survives. It is within this context of linguistic resilience that the festival finds its deepest purpose: to give visibility, through cinema, to communities that preserve rare and endangered idioms. The screen at Parco Palmieri showcases films in Grico, Sardinian, Calabrian Greek, Salentino, Salernitano, Lucanian, Kurdish (Kirdki-Zazaki), Talysh, Cornish, Catalan, Friulian, Occitan, Swahili, and many other languages.

A multidisciplinary program

The event is divided into three complementary sections:

• Evò ce Esù Visioni: the heart of the festival, featuring evening screenings of feature films, documentaries, and short films, many of which have been awarded at the Babel Film Festival in Cagliari;
• Evò ce Esù Talk: meetings, presentations of cultural networks, and debates on linguistic policies and minority rights;
• Evò ce Esù Arte: exhibitions, installations, and the closing concert that marks the end of each edition.

Organizers

The festival is promoted by the Cooperativa Sociale Open, which manages Parco Palmieri, in partnership with the Cineteca Sarda and the Babel Film Festival of Cagliari, with the support of the Municipality of Martignano and the collaboration of Grecìa Salentina school networks and European projects for the preservation of minority languages. The artistic direction is led by Pantaleo Rielli. Admission to all evenings is free.

An immersive experience

Immersed in the greenery of Parco Palmieri under the September sky, each evening begins at sunset and concludes with live music. Between screenings, audiences, directors, and activists engage in discussions on themes such as identity, migration, the environment, and memory. Evò ce Esù Visioni is much more than a film festival: it is a cultural outpost that, from Salento, looks toward all the linguistic minorities of the Mediterranean and the world.