HOW WAS LA GUARIMBA BORN?
Giulio Vita was born in Italy and grew up in Venezuela. He studied Journalism in Caracas and, after being kidnapped and tortured by the police for protesting against the government, he decided to return to Italy. He went on to study Cinema in Madrid, where he met a group of young artists and filmmakers, many of them Venezuelan like him.
But the story of La Guarimba begins before the festival. In 2011, while still a student, Giulio self-produced the short film LA MIA MANTIA, bringing his classmates from the Madrid film school to Amantea and taking charge of both directing and production. The idea was to bring cinema to Amantea, a town whose only connection to the projection of images was an outdoor cinema that some summers chose not to open.
In December 2010, four months before the shoot, Giulio gave a few talks in the local schools to encourage young people to pursue their dreams, in a region where school dropout rates were rising and those who completed their studies chose to move to the North or abroad. The film was meant as an example of what it means to claim your roots and face the problems of Southern Italy by directly involving the community: three orchestras, fishermen, theatre actors and people who had never stood in front of a camera, in locations chosen to give a fresh look to the town’s old places.
It was a self-sustainable production: the crew, all film students, paid for their own travel, a hotel sponsored accommodation and meals, and the equipment rental and extras were covered thanks to the Municipality of Amantea, private entities and many locals who offered their time and support. It was during that adventure that Giulio realised the possibilities the town offered to make things happen, the great solidarity of its people and the need for things to happen. It is a vision of cinema as a medium for social and political discourse, not partisan but humane and plural, that still lies at the heart of everything we do.
Back in Madrid, after graduating, half as a game and half as a challenge, the idea of La Guarimba began to take shape over a beer and a chat with friends at a bar, as a personal response to the superficiality and lack of social impact of film festivals.
So, at the end of 2012, Giulio moved to Amantea, the small Calabrian town his grandparents came from. He gave himself one year to produce the first edition of La Guarimba International Film Festival, with the help of the friends who had believed in the idea.
Together with illustrator Sara Fratini, Giulio also created LA MIA MANTIA: STORIE DI PAESE, a series of video interviews, articles and illustrations about the townspeople who practise a craft with their own hands. It was the first way the organisation built a relationship with the community of Amantea.
That year never ended. Today La Guarimba is still a family project: Giulio lives in Amantea with his wife, Lilibeth Bolívar, and their three children, and together they keep the organisation active all year round, supported by a wider family of team members, volunteers and collaborators from all over the world.
WHAT IS LA GUARIMBA?
La Guarimba was born as a short film festival in the summer of 2013, became a Cultural Association in front of a notary, then people more learned than us called it a Social Innovation project and, later, the festival’s volunteers and guests recognised it as an experience of community, sharing and exchange.
For us La Guarimba is a life project, a bet won against pessimism, the global economy and that myth which tells Southern kids that there is nothing to do in the South.
WHAT IS OUR MISSION?
Our main goal is to bring cinema back to the people and the people back to the cinema.
We want to create a multicultural space with a political connection to the world, attention to others, mutual respect and active participation. La Guarimba must help create a civic atmosphere of empathy, understanding, integration and action.
We want to bring back culture in general, and cinema in particular, as a social act with which to oppose an increasingly individualistic world. We need to create a meeting point where we can share ideas and live a collective but also personal experience.
WHAT IS OUR PROCESS?
One of the keys to La Guarimba’s growth is the creation of a strong community through film festivals, cultural events, film residencies and educational workshops in schools. These events promote collaboration, creative initiative and discovery through Montessori educational practices, cooperative learning and care for the environment.
The people involved in this process are the artists selected from all over the world and hosted in Amantea during the festival, the volunteers and team who work on each initiative, the professionals training in the artistic residencies, and the middle and high school students who make animated films through the educational workshops. This openness to diversity generates a constant flow of new perspectives and skills that run through our organisation, changing it every day.
Learning happens on many levels: from sharing guest houses to the care and structure of every training activity, so that participants can carry it out with complete autonomy and creative freedom, following the Montessori principles of empowerment through clear rules and of the freedom to choose, to make mistakes and to develop one’s own path in a natural and spontaneous way. We work as a team in a safe environment, where guests and organisers alike challenge themselves and collaborate with others in full trust, ensuring a relationship of mutual and constant growth.
OUR COMMITMENT TO THE TERRITORY
We have always used culture as a tool for integration and coexistence, fighting to give a voice to those who cannot assert their rights and showing that the union of different cultures is a richness worth pursuing.
Our organisation has actively spoken out against the ongoing violation of human rights in Venezuela over the last thirty years, about which very little is said in order to accommodate political interests. Through the programme El Guayabo – The Venezuelan Diaspora, we are committed to telling the stories of those who have lived the condition of political refugees first-hand.
Through the special sections Karmala and MigrArti in the festival programme and the CinemAmbulante film series, we give space to works from the countries that the migrants arriving on Italian shores for years have left, telling their stories without filters, showing the world the hardships they face and why institutions and associations need to embrace welcome and solidarity.
Over the years we have spoken out publicly in support of this cause, denouncing the abuse of young people working – in exploitative conditions – in the fields of Amantea and the many episodes of racism they have suffered.
In July 2020 we reported to the press the absurd situation of Abbas Mian Nadeem, a young immunocompromised Pakistani man who was mistakenly included among the migrants removed from Amantea after testing positive for Covid. For this we received death threats from the ‘Ndrangheta. We worked with the authorities to allow his return to Amantea, helping him find legal assistance and involving Italian and European parliamentarians to shed light on the case.
We created a local network of associations to tackle cases of racism in a systematic and coordinated way, through the language of art and culture, which has never known borders.
We organised workshops, meetings and screenings for the young people of Amantea’s reception centre, working with cultural mediators to support their integration into the community.
At the end of 2021 we bought an abandoned plot of land in the centre of Amantea to open, from July 2022, a new space dedicated to culture, hosting events and moments in which artists, cultural organisations, institutions, activists and citizens can meet and find common ground for new ideas. We decided to call this space IL TERRENITO, which has hosted our film festival since 2023.
In August 2024 we opened La Piccola Biblioteca di Amantea, a unique space in the area, with a Public Library, Study Room, Conference Room and Recording Studio, with the aim of increasing the social capital and quality of life of the people of our territory.
TERRITORIO GUARIMBA
Everything we have built over the years has taken concrete shape in TERRITORIO GUARIMBA, the natural evolution of a journey that began in 2011 with the shooting of La Mia Mantia: a permanent cultural district in the heart of Amantea, active all year round, where La Guarimba is no longer just a summer festival but a stable presence in the life of the town.
Territorio Guarimba holds a tangible heritage, made of places recovered and given back to the community: our office on Via Mazzini, IL TERRENITO, the abandoned plot turned into an open-air cultural space and home of the festival, and LA PICCOLA BIBLIOTECA DI AMANTEA, with its public library, study room, conference room and recording studio.
Alongside the places there is an intangible heritage that matters just as much to us: the festival, the artistic residencies, the school workshops, the relationships between those who arrive from all over the world and those who were born in Amantea, and the memory of the town, with its stories, its crafts and its language. It is a heritage we collect, care for and give back, from the stories of La Mia Mantia to the EMOTIONAL ALPHABET OF THE CALABRIAN DIALECT (Alfabeto Emotivo del Dialetto Calabrese, 2020), directed by Giulio Vita and produced by La Guarimba with the support of the Cosenza Chamber of Commerce, which brings the richness of the Calabrian dialect to the rest of Italy and the world through a young, viral form of communication.
In October 2026 we added a new piece: THE MONKEY AND THE VHS, La Guarimba’s first official video game and the first video game set in a town in Calabria. It is a pixel-art adventure, a tribute to the games we grew up with, with characters born from Mikel Murillo’s illustrations: the festival monkey explores Amantea looking for VHS tapes and wins over the critics with bananas. It can be played in the browser on phones and computers. The game explores the possibilities of video game-induced tourism as a new tool for territorial promotion, inviting anyone, anywhere in the world, to discover the streets, places and characters of Amantea.
Born in a small Calabrian town, Territorio Guarimba has become a European cultural reference point: proof that in the South, too, it is possible to build, to stay and to make things happen.
A CONSTANT BATTLE FOR CIVILITY
2020 turned out to be an extremely difficult year for our organisation.
In February the municipality of Amantea was dissolved for fraudulent manipulation of tenders, contracts and assignments and for mafia infiltration, and was placed under external administration for the following 18 months.
The unexpected health crisis left us without certainties for a long time: the Calabria Region did not publish any call for culture, leaving us without an important source of funding, and many companies withdrew their sponsorship offers. We kept working without knowing whether we would be able to hold the festival in person.
THE BATTLE AGAINST THE BIG DISTRIBUTORS
As summer arrived, we immediately joined a battle alongside the free open-air cinema organisations I Ragazzi del Cinema America in Rome, Scendi C’è il Cinema in Milan and FurgonCINEMA in Central Italy. Together we denounced the lobbying and blackmail of the trade associations of distributors and cinema owners, Anica and Anec, which had given written instructions to Italian and foreign distributors not to grant licences for free film screenings in Italy. The result: 235 screening permits denied out of 263 requests, even though the films had already completed their commercial run in theatres.
The companies involved responded harshly, calling our statements “fake news” and threatening legal action. A parliamentary question was also filed on the matter. On 24 June 2020 the Italian Competition Authority opened an investigation into Anica, Anec and Anec Lazio for “obstacles to the supply of films to free open-air cinemas”. The final ruling came on 26 March 2022, when the Authority established that the trade associations had exceeded “the boundaries of lawful association activity to standardise the strategy of distribution companies towards denials and constraints in the issuing of licences to free arenas”, in violation of Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article 2 of Law no. 287/90.
This story taught us, once again, how necessary our work is to promote a vision of culture that is accessible and free from market logic and the concentration of power.
THE REOPENING OF PARCO LA GROTTA
Despite all this, we managed to hold the 2020 edition in person. The last obstacle was the state of Parco La Grotta, which had remained closed and unmaintained for a year: destroyed and vandalised toilets, rubbish everywhere, weeds and unpruned plants, dirt and broken glass. Without losing heart, we decided to do the work that should have been done by the institutions: we gathered our team and launched an appeal to the citizens. All together we worked non-stop to clean up the park, allowing it to reopen and giving it back to the community of Amantea.
THE URBAN REGENERATION OF THE CAR PARK
In 2021, despite all the work done the year before, we could not return to the Park. In January, part of the historic centre collapsed, also affecting Amantea’s only public green space. Despite the many promises of local politicians, the safety works on the historic centre were never completed and the park was declared unusable.
We searched for an alternative for a long time and found a dreadful place, a symbol of the social decay the town is going through: an abandoned car park, left without maintenance for years and turned, over time, into an open-air dump.
When we arrived at the car park, the situation was bleak: piles of rubbish covered the whole space, with rotten food, dead animals and all kinds of debris, while weeds and reeds left untended for years had taken over the walls.
Drawing energy from our stubbornness and our desire to make this edition happen despite countless difficulties, we began meeting on Saturday and Sunday mornings in July to clean, with our own hands, every corner of the car park under the Calabrian summer sun. Some locals saw us and wanted to help, bringing tools and know-how to prune branches, build dry-stone walls, clear the reeds and move the piles of rubbish we collected.
Once the work was done, we decided that bringing a car park back to normal was not enough. We wanted to go further and make it better: an immense open-air work of art, available to everyone, that could become an example of how to restore beauty to abandoned spaces.
We invited two artists to create their works here in Amantea: Venezuelan illustrator Sara Fratini and Cesáh, the artist name of Paulo Albuquerque, a Brazilian muralist based in Portugal. Two very different styles that managed to bring new life to the setting that hosted the festival.
We found ourselves forced to mobilise an entire civil community to make up for the absence of the institutions, which had already ignored the problem by failing to carry out routine maintenance and rubbish collection for years.
We paid for a bulldozer out of our own pockets to finish the clean-up, because the extraordinary commission running the municipality dissolved for mafia infiltration did not step in as promised during the meetings we had organised in the previous months.
We showed a possible and alternative model of society, capable of taking back public spaces and coming together to work and grow side by side.
OUR STANCE IN SUPPORT OF UKRAINE
Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022, we have taken a clear stance in support of the Ukrainian people, victims of Putin’s imperialism and of the distortions of Russian propaganda (and part of the Italian one).
We did so through four actions:
- We exempted all Ukrainian filmmakers from the festival entry fee, allowing them to take part for free. Three films by these directors were presented at La Guarimba 2022 as part of the special programme SLÁVA UKRAYÍNI!
- We excluded from the festival all producers, directors and distributors who had expressed clear pro-Putin positions. Instead, we selected Russian directors who had publicly spoken out against the invasion.
- On 12 March 2022 we organised the screening of the documentary The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020), directed by Iryna Tsilyk, winner of the Directing Award in the “World Cinema Documentary” category at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. The screening was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Embassy of Ukraine in Italy, the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Italy, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, Cineteca Milano and Z-Power-Young People Back to the Movies.
- For the sixth edition of Kino Guarimba, in September 2022, we offered a scholarship covering the fee, travel, food and accommodation for ten Ukrainian participants, who were able to take part in an international training experience for free. The scholarships were funded by the European Cultural Foundation, which supported the initiative. We repeated the initiative for the eighth edition of the residency, in September 2023, offering a scholarship to five Ukrainian participants thanks to the support of the European Commission.
THE RESPONSE TO THE EARTHQUAKE IN VENEZUELA
On 24 June 2026 a double earthquake struck Venezuela, the country where Giulio Vita grew up and to which La Guarimba has been connected since its very beginning. More than 3,300 dead, over 16,700 injured and tens of thousands missing, a toll worsened by years of corruption and the absence of earthquake-resistant building standards. As a festival born from a bridge between Calabria and Venezuela, we could not simply look away.
We launched a fundraising campaign, distributed hygiene and food kits and directly supported the local organisations Chamos and Hogar Bambi, as well as several Venezuelan artists affected by the earthquake. The work carried out in Italy brought the story to Repubblica, Vanity Fair and Chora Media.
With the funds raised during La Guarimba International Film Festival we organised a day-long medical and humanitarian mission in Todasana, a coastal community near La Guaira left isolated after the earthquake. It began as an intuition of Dr. Andrea Gerardi and was carried out together with People in Need, Impaktemos AC, Cocinando por Venezuela, Dividendo Voluntario Venezuela, A.C. Banco del Libro and the 3 Pasos Poliritmo network, coordinated from Italy in constant contact with our team on the ground in Venezuela, filmmakers Oriana Martínez and Nil Jaen.
The result: 125 people seen by doctors, 144 families supported, 115 dignity and food kits distributed, 18 families reached in rural areas and more than 70 children taking part in a recreation area for Children’s Day, thanks to over 130 donors and 50 allies between Italy and Venezuela.
During the 14th edition of the festival (7-12 August 2026) we kept this connection alive with a Venezuelan drumming workshop led by Eileyn “La Negra” Ugueto, one of the great voices of the very coast hit hardest by the earthquake. Another chapter in the fourteen-year relationship between our organisation and the land where it all began.
