2) The Festival has been going for 27 years now, and there are several others that take place in the city. Does Trieste have a long history when it comes to cinema, or have the festivals sprung up independently?
The two older festivals have a common story and a common origin: SciencePlusFiction and Trieste Film Festival.
Trieste Science+Fiction Festival was founded in 2000 under the name of ScienceplusFiction by the Research and Experimentation Centre “La Cappella Underground” with the ambitious purpose of re-launching the old Festival Internazionale del film di fantascienza (International Science Fiction Film Festival), which had been held in Trieste between 1963 and 1982, and was created by a group of young visual artists, critics ands film experts (La Cappella Underground, one of the first film clubs in Italy). Two of them, Piero Percavassi and his sister Annamaria, together with a group of friends and film buffs, decided to bring into existence another cultural association, “Alpe Adria Cinema”, with the clear intention of dedicating a specific film event to that rich and complex geo-political area around Trieste, the CEE countries, at that time less visible than nowadays and little known. TSFF is now the widest and best-structured Italian festival dedicated expressly to Central and Eastern European cinema.
The first edition of the festival (the “zero” edition) dates back to 1987; a time of great transformation and in which the free movement of ideas was hampered by the division of cultural, economic and political integration between the Eastern and Western blocs. The festival (which was then called "Alpe Adria: film areas in comparison") was, however, the logical outcome of a long study on the cinema of Central and Eastern Europe which was carried out by film fans in Trieste which, without public subsidies, gave birth during the 70s and 80s to continuous events and screenings with films from countries behind the Iron Curtain (Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc.) which were completely marginalised by their own membership in the Soviet bloc and by the censorship of Western markets, but were animated by apprehension and unrest which was perceived and felt especially Trieste, a city which shares its borders with the East, which saw deep intertwining roots of its past in the history and culture of these countries with which it shared the difficult realities of a strategic and accessible border, a transit point, cohabitation, and docking.
The Trieste Film Festival is deeply rooted in the town (and in the neighbouring countries) where it was created, and it reflects the story and the cultures of the territories around Trieste. In Italy it could have been funded only here!