Monday 6 November begins a cycle of events in which the language of cinema and the voices of history meet to create a "strange couple". At aperitif time, the new HarpoLab space will host, as a preview of the start of its activities, seven dialogues between experts starting from the viewing of some film scenes; after dinner, at the Cuminetti Theatre, some films with a historical theme will be screened, chosen from the most recent and original, almost all for the first time on the big screen in Trentino.

The new cycle of events entitled "The Strange Couple" is the result of the fruitful collaboration between different institutions and cultural realities in the area. Cinema and history". The Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino, the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico of FBK, the cultural associations Harpo and Funambolo have joined forces and, with the support of the Municipality of Trento and the collaboration of the Centro Servizi Culturali S. Chiara and the Società di Studi Trentini di Scienze Storiche, are organising a series of dialogues and screenings to be held between November 2023 and the first months of 2024. Two spaces were chosen to bring together the seventh art with modern and contemporary history: the new HarpoLab space in Piazza Garzetti 24 will host, at 6 pm, the seven dialogues between film experts and history scholars, while the Teatro Cuminetti in Via Santa Croce will host the four evening screenings (8.45 pm). The themes chosen range from the topicality of the history embodied in the monuments to the use (even political) of archival materials, to the classics of historiography, such as fascism and the Shoah. The collective vision of moving images is the trait d 'union of the two types of events: whether they are segments of commented and deconstructed films, as happens in the afternoon dialogues, or complete films unpublished for the Trentino audience, the choice is always careful and original.  

Below is a detailed description of the schedule with dates, guests and screenings.

The first meeting, on Monday 6 November, will see Marcello Bonazza, historian and teacher of the G. Prati Classical High School, and Guido Laino, film expert and author, in dialogue. "Past and future: the restless visions of dystopia", this is the title of the meeting, will question the story of the negative of history proposed by literary works and films that in their time have imagined a dark-tinted future.
The following Monday, November 13, will be the turn of "Celluloid and papier-mâché: fascism in films", a "hot" subject of yesterday's and today's cinema films commented by Guido Laino and by the historian Francesco Filippi, author of the popular Mussolini has also done good things (Bollati Boringhieri 2019) and We, however, have made him the streets (Bollati Boringhieri 2021).
On November 20, with the theme "Monuments and removals: the past that does not pass", the event doubles because the afternoon dialogue between the historian Giorgio Lucaroni and the director Valerio Ciriaci, accompanied by the American producer Isaac J. Liptzin, is joined by the evening screening of their film Stonebreakers (2022, 70', directed by Valerio Ciriaci) on the protest against the national monuments following the assassination of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.
"Archive and storytelling: film editing and creative reuse of images" will be the last appointment of 2023, scheduled for November 27, with the "strange couple" formed by the historian Maurizio Cau and the film and media scholar Alberto Brodesco and the evening screening of The Natural History of Destruction (2022, 112', directed by Sergei Loznitsa): the well-known Ukrainian director reflects this time on the consequences of conflicts on the civilian population with a film based on archival footage of the Second World War.
The cycle of appointments will resume in the first months of 2024, between January and February, with three other dialogues, dedicated to the cinematographic representation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews ("Shoah and memory: the image found"), to the theme of body and motherhood declined between reality and black fairy tale ("Rite and story: the road to the miracle"), and again to archival images but this time to their use in documentary series of biographical genre ("Archival footage and Italian streaming: from Sanpa to Wanna"). The guests in dialogue will be the historians Anna Veronica Pobbe and Fernanda Alfieri, the sociologist Sara Zanatta, the director Laura Samani, and Daniele Ongaro, author, producer and archive researcher. As for the films, the large screen of the Cuminetti Theatre will host two other screenings of absolute interest: on the occasion of Memorial Day, the film Three minutes: a lengthening (2022, 69', directed by Bianca Stigter), about life in a Jewish village in Poland shortly before its destruction, and in February the film Small Body (2021, 89', directed by Laura Samani), also presented in Cannes, which traces a mother's journey to a shrine, to avoid limbo for her stillborn daughter.