Villa Medici Film Festival

The Villa Medici Film Festival comes back for its fourth edition from 11 to 15 September 2024!

→ More information on the fourth edition

Created in 2021, the Villa Medici Film Festival is dedicated to artists and film directors who explore contemporary practices of the moving image. Essays, fictions or documentaries: it shows films that invent their own form and offers a glimpse of the most contemporary filmic creation.

For more than a decade, the links between cinema and contemporary art have continuously intensified and generated new film writings. The role of Villa Medici is to foster a dialogue between the arts and to open up these new territories of creation.

The Festival is divided into three parts:

  • the international competition, composed of fourteen films of all lengths and genres – documentary, fiction, essay – made in the year preceding the Festival and from all five continents.
  • the Focus selection, with masterclasses, performances and projections of out-of-competition artists films.
  • the Piazzale screenings, recent films presented each evening in the main courtyard of the Villa Medici (Piazzale) to bring together all audiences.

The Festival takes place in several areas of the Villa Medici – two indoor movie theaters, an open-air cinema, installations, meeting places – which will be transformed for a few days into a showcase for cinema.

At the end of the festival week, two prizes are awarded by an international jury as part of the international competition: the Villa Medici Prize for best film and the Jury Prize for a unique film that caught the attention of the jurors.

Please find all the practical information to attend the second edition of the Festival, from 14 to 18 September 2022 at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici.

Cinema at Villa Medici

Since 1974, the French Academy in Rome has welcomed resident filmmakers or screenwriters (Clément Cogitore, Mitra Farahani, Benjamin Crotty, Thomas Salvador, Nora Martirosyan, Xavier Beauvois, Rémy Belvaux…) and artists making short and feature films (Éric Baudelaire, Valérie Mréjen, Lola Gonzàlez). Since the early 2000s, Villa Medici has been showcasing cinematographic creation and its history, with programming initiatives such as Cinemondo, Re | visioni or Cinema all’aperto festival.

Photos: © M3studio and Daniele Molajoli