To get to Giffoni you have to climb for forty minutes, in the midst of curves and countryside, starting from Salerno. Who wonders why the children’s film festival was created up here, Gino, a bus driver, replies that “once there was a small cinema from which everything was born”. And then it offers you a coffee to bring you to visit it: today, instead of cinema, there is a bar. There is poetry, in his story, and proud belonging. We are in a country of eleventh souls, of the most Italian ones cannot be: on the right Cilento, on the left the Amalfi Coast, or areas attacked by tourists, while in the middle there is this country out of course, all ovens and old signs, with a convent of the sixteenth century to ennoble its history. Small and decentralized, in fact. Yet, every summer, the eyes of all the boys of Italy who dream of cinema point here. For fifty -five years.

A “child”. But it is far from a game

Poetry, it was said. However, the time lasts to get out of the bus and get lost in a village which, for ten days, is populated exclusively by children and teenagers: five thousand every year, called to judge the films in the race at the “Giffoni Film Festival”, to assign the “Gryphon Award”. For ten days, they decide: small jurors high and a hat high, all dressed in green, between 3 and 10 years; Girls in shorts and blue shirts, to indicate the fair of teenagers instead. Everyone moves between projections, debates, meetings with the artists -from Tim Burton to Paolo Sorrentino -, playing to make the Parliament of this “Bambinocracy”. But everything is so much a game, as we will discover. Poetry, we said, leaves room for the party, because where there are children there is always a party. And not just that. A famous film says that “whoever comes to the south cries twice: when he arrives and when he starts again”. Well, Giffoni is crying every quarter of an hour. Of emotion. Of beauty.

Francois Truffaut, the director, said that “among all the cinema festivals this is the most necessary”. Here he was a guest in 1982 And who founded Giffoni when he was just 18 years old. This year resigning – he will leave the guide to his son Jacopo – it still happens to cross him in any corner of any room, to observe on the sidelines or to end up attacked by children: as the iconography of the good leader wants, it is present. “We made a small country in the South the world capital of children’s cinema,” he says to TODAYwith equally proud belonging. “To give me strength were always the boys, even in the tortuous moments. I still remember the first editions: we brought the chairs from home. We say the future, but we are wrong: they are the present. Here, in Giffoni, they speak, confront each other, they ask. They need to know. When I see all this, I think that my life did not waste it. Indeed, I used it well”. In short, in a hasty world that puts the “young generations” all in the same cauldron, here in Giffoni they are allowed to speak first. It looks little, but it’s not little. And it’s not even rhetoric.

Claudio Gubitosi, founder of Giffoni, leaves after 55 years: “We left from a square, with the chairs taken from home. The most beautiful day? Gorbaciov guest”

Claudio Amendola: “A Giffoni I received the most beautiful questions”

Because yes: it’s true, Giffoni comes for the passion towards cinema. But this is not only this, as we will see later. Martina, 15 years old, says that here he found “credibility for his dream”: imagining a career as an artist elsewhere, makes her feel judged – as the most common narration of her age wants, which knows how to be among the most cruel. Giorgio Lomastro, who has 24 years old, has come to Giffoni since he is a teenager: “Here I learned that my opinion counts. Having a microphone in the hands of 13 years of age, in front of a debate of 700 people, gives you a certain self -esteem. In my training years, this has modeled me”. Claudio Amendola, a guest to promote the Cesaroni, says that Giffoni received “the most beautiful questions of his career”: those of the boys. He says it because it overwhelmed by emotion and, perhaps, by generous encouragement. A girl asks him for advice on which acting academy to attend. On the floor below, in the green room, Francesco Montanari is holding a laboratory on the actor’s profession: to the boys, often branded as bodies replicating trends on Tiktok, he explains how instinct to regulate body communication on stage and beyond.

But cinema is only a pretext

In short, the days pass and you understand that Giffoni is a pretext in Giffoni. As, after all, it has always been and for everyone: the big screen projects stories that disguise symbols, open imaginations, build identity. And here they serve to form those of the future. Among the favorite films of Sofia, 5 years old, there is the story of a nephew who loses her grandmother and that of a team of children ready to save nature. “And I learned that the emotions are beautiful but also ugly,” he says. Giulia, 29, who attends the festival of ten, explains: “Children see films committed, although adapted to their age, and often in the debates with the actors ask existential questions of the type ‘but what is happiness for you?'”. Maria, 13, is sitting on the steps of the entrance, next to a girl from Georgia, and already uses the word “inclusiveness”: there is a forward -looking organization here in Giffoni for which the local boys host the peers who come from outside, in an intercultural but, above all, relational exchange. An literacy no longer only by subsidiary, but also emotional and civic, in -depth with the growth of age.

“As a child I had a tumor.” The stories

It is true, as Gubitosi says, that Giffoni “the boys speak, speak”. But above all they learn to speak. On the contrary: they teach to give a name to concepts that, as adults, often we still don’t know how to face. “As a child I had a tumor. Today, everyone relates to me in two ways: with Pietismo, or with forced irony. How can I help them not feel uncomfortable?”, Asks a 19 year old in Lello Marangius, comic author and disabled. Another intervenes: “I have always lived with a disability. But my parents have always disincentive to me to play sports. Why?”. To Gino Cecchettin, on the other hand, a boy asks what can be learned from the history of his daughter Giulia, victim of femicide two years ago. He asks him: “What man do I have to become, to build a better future?”. Because the taboos of the past do not exist in the future. Indeed, in the present, Gubitosi would say. This is the philosopher’s stone.

“What can I learn from Giulia’s story?”. Gino Cecchettin’s (exciting) response to a boy

After eleven years of Giffoni, Giorgio Lomastro has now become the conductor of the main events and moderator the debates for teenagers. The last artist interviewed? Tim Burton. Above all, today he studies as an actor, between Italy and America. “The first time I came I was 13 years old: I was in the Fanboy phase, I followed Harry Potter, Glee. And there were guests the actors. Then, every July, my holidays were here. Once my mom gave me the journey to go to the Coldplay concert for Christmas, in the following July. But the same month was Giffoni. I chose Giffoni. It is thanks to what I understood. Just take it. “