La Guarimba International Film Festival

La Guarimba is a cultural organisation situated in the southern Italian region of Calabria with the aim of bringing the cinema back to the people and the people back to the cinema. We work with cinema and illustration using culture as a vehicle to promote our values of participatory democracy, integration and accessibility. Upon returning to his homeland, Calabro-Venezuelan Giulio Vita founded the film festival in collaboration with Sara Fratini, a Venezuelan illustrator and Madrid Fine Arts graduate and El Tornillo de Klaus, a Spanish audiovisual artists collective. Guarimba, in venezuelan indigenous language, means “safe place”. La Guarimba’s main objective is to bring the cinema back to the people and the people back to the cinema. This goal is at the helm of the restoration of a 938 seat outdoor theater in Calabria, the organization of an international film festival with free entry, and the creation of La Scuola Delle Scimmie in Puglia, an informal school for teaching cinema and illustration. It also prompted us to create La Guarimba On Tour, an initiative that takes the festival’s official selections around the world for smaller, often impromptu, screenings. What’s more, in August 2015 we organized the first European Vimeo conference about direct online distribution for independent film.