Stories, lives, people and mountains: a humanist festival in a ferocious era

Published 01/04/2026

19 films selected for the international competition, with a total of 130 films from no less than 38 countries

Gervasini: “The complexity of the mountains is expressed through a new visual language, more aware and open to overall perception”

Celebrating mountain film, its richness and complexity. The 74th Trento Film Festival again sets itself a goal as lofty as the peaks captured by its metaphorical camera. The international competition embodies perfectly this desire to describe and convey the complexity of the highest lands around the world. There are nineteen works competing for the gold and silver Gentians awarded by the international jury, thirteen full-length films and six short films, representing fifteen nationalities: USA, United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, France, Republic of Congo, Bulgaria, Bolivia, Iran, Canada, Argentina, the Netherlands, Cambodia, Portugal and Georgia.

“Are there any common threads running through the films? Perhaps: the search for meaningful narrative approaches is highlighted in the diversity of stories and contexts, going beyond standard mountaineering film and shifting the focus in ways that are at times radical: no longer (only) content but rather form, in some cases more experimental and in others classic, but never merely educational or informative. It is as if the complexity of the mountains finally deserves a new visual language – one that is more aware and open to overall perception”, explained Mauro Gervasini, responsible for the film programme for Trento Film Festival.

“Films that are meant to be seen but also ‘heard’, as demonstrated by the short film by Laurence Olivier, Film de roche or Vincent Munier’s Le chant des forêts, fresh from winning the César for Best Documentary, or even the short film A Bear Remembers by Zhang & Knight, all of which, in their own distinct ways, seem to call on the viewer to focus on listening before watching”, continued Gervasini, summarising the content of the films in the international competition. “Experimental works such as Victor Kossakovsky’s Trillion, which revisits the myth of Sisyphus dear to French existentialists, through a finely woven black-and-white photographic narrative, or The Wind Blows Wherever It Wants by Georgian director Ivan Boiko, depicting the transhumance of shepherds with their flocks as if it were the flowing of a river, following the natural rhythm of the mountains. The wind blows wherever it wishes, regardless of mankind, one might say. Some, however, are renewing their challenge to the peaks. It is a wholesome challenge: a test of personal limits and the biological clock, without steamrolling the rockfaces, their morphology or their very essence. This is evident in the competition’s mountaineering films: Dawn Kish’s Old Man Lightning featuring the legendary American climber John “Verm” Sherman, Jon Glassberg’s Girl Climber with Emily Harrington, Ambroise Abondance’s Pas peur du bonheur featuring Paralympic athlete Oscar Burnham, but also Ivan Vescovo’s 3000 km en bicicleta with former Olympic cyclist Iñaki Mazza, who, at just 21 years of age, abandoned the circus of competitive sport to experience pure athletic endeavour on a BMX journey across Patagonia. The thirteen feature films in the competition also include a fiction film: The North by Bart Schrijver, centred on a friendship put to the test by a 600-mile trek across Scotland.

Trento Film Festival kicks off with the international premiere of Marco Zuin’s Per silenzio e vento, a touching documentary exploring the spiritual bond between people and the mountain environment, going beyond the idea of mountaineering as a conquest or hedonistic pursuit to become a profound form of listening, through the eyes of writer Matteo Righetto and his encounters with mountaineers, scholars, and those living in the mountains. It is a reflection on the ethical value of high-altitude environments in an era of ecological crisis and overtourism. The event will close with another highly anticipated premiere, Climbing for Life by Junji Sakamoto, the incredible story of Junko Tabei, the first woman to conquer Everest in 1975, who continued to take on the mountains until the very end, despite being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Following the success of last year’s edition, the “Cincontri” programme continues, serving as a symbolic link between the two pillars of the Festival – the films and the events. The directors, and in some cases the films’ protagonists, will be present at the cinemas for a real-life discussion following the screenings. The participants include: Matteo Oleotto, director of Ultimo schiaffo; the mountaineers Matteo della Bordella and Tommaso Lamantia, featured in Gian Luca Gasca’s Oltre i venti del sud; the explorer Kim Young-Mi, director and protagonist of the film Alone in Antarctica; Um Hong-Gil, the mountaineer featured in Le Seok-Hoon’s film The Himalayas; Thomas Prenn and Francesco Acquaroli, stars of Michael Kofler’s film Zweitland – Seconda patria, who will be present at the screening alongside writer Francesca Melandri; Luciano Casagrande, Giuseppe Cederna and Ram Kedar Negi Gawa, co-stars of Beniamino Casagrande’s film Il rospo e il diamante.

“Stories, lives, people and mountains. These are the cornerstones of the 74th Trento Film Festival, which chooses to take a humanist stance at a time in history that borders on the inhuman, telling tales of resistance from and in the mountains: the female partisan in Chiara Zoja’s short film Prima dell’aurora, the young South African gamekeeper battling poachers in Cindy Lee’s The Last Ranger, the West Bank olive growers in Maggie Lemere’s Land of Canaan, and the footballers defying the depopulation of their mountain community in Dimitris Koutsiabasakos’s Greek film The Goals of August. Then there are the different generations of women from Trentino fighting for their emancipation in Elena Goatelli’s Femène, presented in the Near Horizons section. Different worlds and different perspectives, both distant and close to home, while the richness of experience is the common denominator”, concluded Gervasini, inviting the public to join the Festival at the Cinema Modena or Supercinema Vittoria in Trento, for a 74th edition that is certain to once again deliver the thrill of the mountains.