One Night in Gallio

Since 18 July, every evening of the Gallio Film Festival has opened the same way: the lights go down over the rows of seats, the chatter thins to a murmur, and Whispered Green begins on the big screen. I have watched it happen from the middle of the audience. It does not become ordinary.

On the screen, the photographs of Adriana Benetti Longhini and Gianni Rigoni Stern breathe: fog leaning on the spruces, the plateau turning gold at the edge of night. Between them, my drone shots of the same land, filmed a few hundred metres from where the audience now sits. The Altopiano watches itself.

The landscape in the video is real. So is the audience.

This week I filmed thirty-eight seconds of it: the crowd, the screen, the music filling the hall. Alma is a virtual artist — human-authored, AI-rendered — and yet nothing about this moment is virtual: the seats, the mountain evening outside, people who came for the films and met her voice first.

The festival goes on, evening after evening. If you find yourself on the Altopiano dei Sette Comuni, come for the cinema; Whispered Green will meet you at the door.