The Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia is proud to announce that journalist and author Francesca Mannocchi is the new Artistic Director of the Abruzzo Branch School of the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema. The mission of this branch is the training in Audio-visual Reporting.

The new Director’s task is to reinvent the training course in terms of innovation and internationalisation, also involving professors and high-profile figures from all over the world.

The objective is to constitute a school of reportage that looks to Italy and the world. At the same time, thanks to training pathways of excellence, it should contribute to the entry into employment of in-demand professionals of creative reporting who are also highly skilled in journalism.

The L’Aquila branch will become even more different from the Palermo Branch School, whose mission is the training in documentary creative filmmaking and the ‘cinema of the real.’

Francesca Mannocchi is “honoured to accept this assignment. Over the past few years, the world of journalism has increasingly been regarded with mistrust; on the contrary, I believe this is the right time to prove how necessary rigorous information is, i.e., the kind that our profession is tasked with conveying. First the pandemic, and then the war, have contributed to a change in the profession of the storyteller, the filmmaker, and the video journalist; they paved the way for new forms of storytelling that should be known and mastered while providing an accurate depiction of reality and remaining loyal to a professional code of conduct that indicates a well-defined roadmap of the criteria by which we have to abide. The school I have in my mind holds together journalism, art, literature, film, and music. I wish the training of CSC students not only included journalism, film editing, and reporting techniques, but also aroused their curiosity towards art forms to fuel their storytelling. For this reason, I am planning on getting Italian and international reporters involved as well as organizing a parallel scheme of workshops and activities to support the courses, meetings with writers, film directors and editors, and musicians who will take the floor from Italy and the world.”

According to Marta Donzelli, President of the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, “Never before have we felt such necessity of authoritative and reliable information against approximation; never before have we acknowledged to such an extent the power of images and the need to use them with competence, intelligence, a sensitive approach, and sense of responsibility in order to narrate and understand the world in which we live. In this scenario, the reportage – a word that feels ‘twentieth-century’ only apparently – still plays a major role and not only as an audio-visual ‘genre,’ but as a true instrument of democracy. For this reason, also owing to the precious help and experience of a great journalist and writer, Andrea Purgatori, a member of the Fondazione CSC Board of Directors, we want to work towards strengthening the Abruzzo Branch School. We are equally glad that Francesca Mannocchi agreed to take its lead: we rejoice for a worldly-acknowledged professional to join us.”

Adriano De Santis, Dean of the Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, also comments, “Francesca Mannocchi’s experience, professionalism, and energy will contribute decisively to enhance the training programme offered by the CSC Abruzzo Branch School. In the role of Artistic Director, she will share her cultural and creative substance with the students; her job will be a daily reminder of the importance of news reporting in contemporary society.”

Francesca Mannocchi is an Italian journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. She has been working with national and international newspapers for years.

Her work is focused on migration and conflicts. She reported from Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Ukraine, and Somalia.

She won several awards, including the 2016 Premiolino, the Premio Rizzi per il Giornalismo, and the 2022 European Award Investigative and Judicial Journalism. In 2018, along with photographer Alessio Romenzi, Mannocchi co-wrote and co-directed the documentary Isis, Tomorrow. The Lost Souls of Mosul, which premiered at the 75^th Venice Film Festival. In 2019, she published her debut novel, Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente (Einaudi), the story of a trafficker of human beings, earning the Premio Estense. That same year, she described the conflicts in the Middle East in Porti ciascuno la sua colpa (Laterza) and published Libia (Mondadori), a work of graphic journalism illustrated by Gianluca Costantini. In 2021, Mannocchi published her sophomore novel Bianco è il colore del danno (Einaudi). In 2022, she carried off the Flaiano Award for Journalism and published Lo sguardo oltre il confine (DeAgostini), where Mannocchi for the first time narrates the current conflicts addressing the younger audiences.