Born in 1997 as the first Italian festival of spiritual cinema and interreligious dialogue , in 2022 Religion Today Film Festival will celebrate its 25th anniversary, an important and demanding goal that leads us to look behind us, to measure our path.

The Religion Today festival has come a long way, and today this appointment with religious cinema is known and appreciated all over the world, it has many admirers and friends, it makes films travel but above all people and ideas. Religion Today allows us to consolidate that image of Trentino as a land that has linked its fate to one of the most meaningful events in the spiritual history of the West – the Council of Trent – but which has been able to renew itself from those foundations with creativity, commitment and tenacity becoming a land of welcome, interreligious dialogue, solidarity and peace.

25 years ago the issues of migration and multiculturalism , today part of the fabric of an increasingly interconnected global community, were already in the air, even if they had not yet achieved the attention they deserve. Others still had to show themselves and explode with destructive force and violence, the turning point of September 11, the alleged “clash of civilizations” that began there, the wars and humanitarian emergencies that have shocked the world.

In a world deeply troubled by a global pandemic that has sown death and disease , these issues are very current and impose the need to fight the virus of selfishness and fear. Injecting into today’s society strong antibodies capable of fighting the germs of racism, radicalism, extremism that threaten our community from within, that foment hatred rather than promote dialogue.

Religion Today is even more current, necessary to give space to ideas and all religions , filtering them through the art of cinema and its great protagonists, narrators of our time.