After the success of its debut in 2025, Scriptopia, the first festival dedicated to writing for cinema and TV in Italy, returns to Messina. This year, the second edition of the festival, conceived and organized by the Messina Film Commission – with the support of the Messina Foundation for Culture – will be held from Wednesday 23 to Monday 28 September 2026.
There will be six days of master classes, screenings of short and feature films, meetings with authors and screenwriters, and musical performances. Scriptopia is also a festival dedicated to the education of students, and for this reason in the morning, the Cospecs and Scipog departments of the University of Messina will host meetings with fiction and documentary screenwriters conducted from an interdisciplinary perspective by the members of the scientific committee coordinated by professor Federico Vitella. Professor Adriano d’Aloia, professor of cinema, photography, television and digital media at the University of Bergamo, journalist and prolific author of cinematographic texts, will also talk about writing for cinema.
All meetings are open to university students and institutes of all levels, but also to simple enthusiasts and lessons and screenings will be completely free. The evening will be dedicated to the screening of feature films at the Church of Santa Maria Alemanna. The main theme of this edition will be “The proximity stranger”. Inspired by Camus’s L’Etranger, the exhibition will investigate the figure of the “foreigner” not only as a physically distant element, but also as the key that triggers the narrative: “The stranger (L’étranger) is a term that evokes distance, but, as Camus’ novel teaches us, it can be much closer than we think, to the point of dwelling within us”, explains Francesco Gulletta of the Messina Film Commission, creator together with Davide Scimone and Enrico Di Giacomo of the festival.
Every evening, not surprisingly, the program will be introduced by the screening of the beautiful animated short film “Una Rosa” by Simone Massi, whose creation required 1500 hand-drawn plates for five minutes narrated by the voice of Valerio Mastrandrea. The short allowed the artist, considered the most influential animation author in Italy, to reach the record of a thousand awards won at festivals around the world. The Messina Foundation for Culture also supports the Festival: “The Foundation has supported this Festival with conviction since last year because it represents excellence on the national and international scene”, said Rosario Coppolino, superintendent of the Messina Foundation for Culture.
WHAT’S ON THE PROGRAM
We start on Wednesday 23rd with Il Quieto Vivere, the second feature film by Gianluca Matarrese, a special event at the authors’ days of the eighty-second Venice Film Festival. The film, a tragicomedy suspended between fiction, documentary and theatrical staging, tells of an apparently harmless but ferocious “family feud” between two sisters-in-law, who transform every occasion into a reason for conflict, underlining above all through the appearance and expressiveness of their respective bodies their differences, the distance, the sought-after otherness which risks plunging the entire family into chaos, laboriously held together by its older members. Thursday 24th will be the turn of the beautiful Sciatunostru, coming of age by Leandro Picarella, a multifaceted artist who moves between direction, writing and music, in which it is the encounter with history, with the visual memory of a place, the island of Linosa, which materializes in the figure of an old cinematographer, which makes (perhaps) less traumatic the separation between two kids who have spent their whole lives together until one of them left for the mainland. Also on Thursday, the meeting with the founders of the cultural association Accussì, who will present the short film Il Paesanazzo, created involving the community of the village of Giampilieri. Paesanazzo is a hymn to hospitality and inclusiveness, which subverts in an intelligent, amused and entertaining way many of the stereotypes that unconsciously make us foreigners. On Friday 26th we will come into contact with realities very close to us of which we know little or nothing. The activity within a cloistered monastery and a journey into the dynamics of the brotherhoods that participate in the Holy Week processions in Sicily, with the award-winning Agnus Dei by Massimiliano Camaiti and Amore by Nunzio Gringeri. At the end, a selection of shorts presented during the fifteenth edition of the Corto di sera Festival, partner of Scriptopia. Saturday 27th will be entirely dedicated to female comedy, with directors and screenwriters Karen Di Porto and Lisa Nur Sultan, who will present Il grande Boccia and Beata te respectively.
THE MISSION
«We often saw works by young filmmakers that were technically flawless but lacked soul, with little story and disjointed dialogues. There is a great desire to tell, but sometimes the imprint of a more professional script is missing. This is why we want to bring young people together with screenwriters”, explains Scimone.
The choice of the Madonna of the Rosary, the main panel of the polyptych of San Gregorio by Antonello da Messina, recently removed from the regional museum, is both a tribute and a provocation. Homage to the way of telling stories to non-literate users before the advent of cinema, but also to the ability of the aforementioned to grasp and interpret symbols and layered meanings of graphic works. Provocation in that the table is reproduced in the poster as a ghostly element, not only because it is no longer available to the community, but precisely because before the theft it was never actually perceived by the city community as an essential element to grasp an important aspect of its history