The Fronte del Porto public cinema hall is reborn thanks to the Luoghi (Non) Comuni call

The Municipality of Padua and the Cariparo Foundation, together with ZaLab Ets, are launching a project to grow the Sala Fronte del Porto and bring it back to the center of social and cultural life of the Guizza neighborhood and the city.

The Sala Civica Fronte del Porto, a precious cultural and community space of the city, is about to be reborn thanks to a project of continuous and participatory reactivation. A new shared management model aims to transform this municipal heritage into a stable point of reference for culture, aggregation and cinematographic exploration. The project, promoted by the Municipality of Padua in collaboration with the Consulta 4A and 4B, and supported by a significant path of investments and recent interventions, intends to restore the continuous programming of a hall that, in recent years, has seen important but episodic proposals of temporary reviews. The hall, owned by the municipality, represents one of the few examples of a public cinema in Italy, capable of offering spaces for sharing and artistic exploration, beyond the schemes of the commercial market.

The fundamental objective of this initiative is to return a valuable heritage to the citizens, transforming it into a place of participation and cultural protagonism. The programming, conceived as collective and shared, will involve a network of associations and cultural entities that have been working in the territory for a long time. Among these, ZaLab, one of the most important entities at a national level in the production and distribution of documentary cinema, and other entities such as Mimosa, Boramosa, Pluriart, Lottodognimese, Centro Pandora, Secondo Tempo, Cuc-CinemaUno, Irfoss, Centro d'Arte, Festival Nazca, Walking Arts, ArteAtm and Cineforum Antonianum, in a Network that is now being reborn and that wants to remain open and traversable.

In recent years, the Municipality of Padua, with the support of the Consultas and through significant investments, has produced renovation and updating interventions of the hall, including new lights and a modern film projector, to overcome the critical issues generated by the Covid-19 pandemic and relaunch the importance of this space. From this point of view, the long-term work of the Consultas 4A and 4B has been fundamental, having already invested resources from the participatory budget in the hall, building the network and the basis from which it is now possible to imagine a relaunch. The current project is part of the call for proposals “Luoghi (non) comuni”, which represents an opportunity for growth for the territory and its inhabitants. With the support of the network of associations and partner bodies, a collective, shared and participatory management model is being built, which aims to make the “Fronte del Porto” emerge as a center of cultural, social and community animation of the surrounding neighborhoods. The challenge is to create a lively, open and relevant place for the whole city, where cinema, music, theatre and photography meet to tell the stories of the community.

The councilor for decentralization and neighborhoods Francesca Benciolini explains: «Together with the Cariparo Foundation and Zalab, as a promoter on behalf of a network of subjects, we are presenting one of the projects that was financed with the non-common places call of the Cariparo Foundation, which allocated 194 thousand euros and which concerns the Sala Fonte del Porto, which is the so-called room number eight of the Porto Astra complex in Guizza. What Cariparo is allowing to give concreteness to today is a project that has a long identity path and that sees on one side the Municipality and on the other a network of subjects of our city that will take care of this asset that is a movie theater, therefore something a little bit anomalous normally for a Municipality, with the aim of becoming a special place of culture in which it is the same citizens, the same associations that propose a design and a management».

The president of the Cariparo Foundation Gilberto Muraro comments: «I want to underline the satisfaction that this call for proposals, Luoghi (Non) Comuni in which the project is included, has given us; first because it had a response that was greater than expected so much so that we significantly increased the overall budget from 3 million to over 5 million and then because it brought to light a series of latent needs, unexploited opportunities, potential to be activated through this pressure to rediscover both closed and open places in our community, to be revitalized, and to be given a new purpose. And I also want to underline that all this was done through a joint venture between a public body, the Municipality, and a third sector body».

Stefano Collizzoli, the soul of ZaLab, adds: «As ZaLab we make documentary films, production, distribution, laboratories, so we could have simply imagined taking over the management of the theater: instead it is something completely different, in the sense that we strongly believe that this theater is truly a public theater, so it does not belong to someone who can close the doors, because it is a theater that has a very plural history and must have shared programming. So the first part of the planning process, from now until September 26 when we have the first opening date of this long festival, which will last a year and a half, there is a path full of co-planning and facilitation that currently involves about fifteen associations, and will involve others because it remains an open path that seeks two things, both difficult but both decisive to give a specific character to this theater. The first is co-programming, that is, ensuring that the programming comes from many minds, from many stimuli, perhaps from a relationship with the territory. The other is trying to build a shared management mechanism between public and private with a view to common goods. The discussion on common goods, that is, on management that is neither public nor private, is current, so we are in some ways at the forefront, especially with regard to complex common goods, that is, places where there is also an economic stake».