The Festival of Real and Unreal Cinema returns for its 23rd edition, from 15 to 18 July 2026 at the Castello Volante in Corigliano d’Otranto. Cinema, music, talks, exhibitions, social gatherings and creative visions will shape four days in which the festival expands its duration and reinvents the way it engages with its spaces, reaffirming its vision of cinema as a place of community, imagination and a journey through the world.
A FESTIVAL SPREAD ACROSS SPACE AND TIME
In the run-up to the July event, a programme of activities will run from February to December 2026: screenings, workshops in schools across Brindisi, Tuturano, San Pancrazio and Copertino, meetings with other organisations and similar initiatives in cultural venues across the region in Leverano, Cursi, Lecce and Tiggiano, exhibition programmes and a street cinema festival organised in collaboration with Magma Aps and their CINE? project on the evenings of 10, 17 and 24 June, which will bring stories of real life to urban spaces and the outskirts of Corigliano d’Otranto and other locations across the region, revitalising places for meeting, viewing and sharing.
The Festival thus continues to create, both inside and outside the cinema, a living space where cinema becomes experience, connection and resistance.
In this era of individual experiences, the Festival returns to the streets, courtyards, homes and other meeting places: a necessary gesture to bring people out of isolation and make them part of a shared, open and generative space through the revolutionary act of being together and inhabiting these places.
THE COMPETITIONS
Among the new features of this 23rd edition is a competition for filmmakers of all ages, divided into two sections: Cortiiiiiii, dedicated to works produced from 1 January 2025 onwards, and Cinema90, reserved for short films lasting no more than 90 seconds.
An invitation to engage with the complexity of the present, to explore the finite and the infinite, the boundaries of the CHAOS in which we live, and the very nature of cinema in all its forms. Two competitions for different durations, united by a single theme: ROADS.
Roads of light, roads of fire, lost roads, roads full of wonders, roads of the past and roads of the future, roads of return, roads of war and roads of peace… On the roads.
> Click here for all the details and the entry form
