A cultural association, not a company. A room, not a marketplace. Here is who we are and why we do this the way we do.
Inte Cinema Festival is run by a small independent cultural association based in Rome. That word — association — matters to us. We are not a commercial entity, and the festival is not a product. It is a project sustained by people who love cinema and believe it belongs in shared rooms, not just private screens.
Our mission is simple to state and difficult to do well: to create a shared space for independent cinema in Rome. A place where a short film made anywhere in the world can find an audience here — a real, seated, attentive audience that watches, responds, and stays to talk.
Founded in 2018, the festival has now run for eight editions and opened its ninth. It has grown, but only in the ways that matter. It has stayed small on purpose.
A short film seen only online reaches an audience that never quite arrives. We believe in the real room: the collective hush, the shared laugh, the applause that a stream can never give back. Showing a film beyond the web is the whole point.
We accept films from anywhere, in any language, across all four categories. Every submission is watched on its own terms — a filmmaker's geography or reputation never decides whether their work gets a Roman audience.
We screen in intimate evening soirées, not multiplex marathons. One film after another, watched properly, with time to breathe between them. Small is not a limitation. It is the design.
After every screening, filmmakers and audience talk. Directors leave with something more useful than a laurel: honest responses from people who just watched their film with fresh eyes.
There are easier cities to run a festival in. There is none more fitting. Rome is where a certain kind of cinema was born — neorealism, cameras taken out into the street, ordinary life made luminous. That inheritance is not a museum piece here; it is in the air, and it sits in the room with every film we screen.
Roman cultural life is, at its best, intimate: long evenings, close conversation, a suspicion of anything too polished. The festival takes its temperament from the city. Filmmakers who come here find that between screenings they are walking the same cobbles that shaped the medium, and the city lends the whole thing a gravity no purpose-built venue ever could.
We think a film shown in Rome is a film shown somewhere that means something. So we stay.
A short film deserves more than a private link watched alone on a laptop. It deserves a dark room, a real audience, and a city that takes it seriously. As a cultural association rather than a business, our commitment is simple: to watch every film on its own terms and to give the ones we select a genuine evening in Rome — screened before people who came to watch closely and then to talk. That, to us, is the most distinctive and most important thing about this festival.
Toribio Domenico founded Inte Cinema Festival in 2018 and has directed every edition since. A Rome-based programmer and lifelong cinephile, he built the festival around a single belief he had grown tired of seeing ignored: that short film deserves a real room and a real audience, not just an upload. He shapes each edition's selection personally, watching every submission that comes in, and it is his conviction that a short film deserves a real room and a real audience that he defends as the festival's whole reason for existing. Under his direction the festival has grown from a twelve-film evening in a single Rome cultural space into an eight-edition institution that has screened work from filmmakers across dozens of countries, while somehow never losing the intimacy of that first night. Colleagues describe him as exacting about the films and warm about the filmmakers. He is happiest during the post-screening conversations, when a director he has never met sits down with an audience of strangers and something honest happens. That, he will tell you, is the festival. Everything else is logistics.
Kimberly Costanzo is the festival secretary and, in practice, the person who holds the whole thing together. She manages submissions, correspondence and the countless details of staging intimate screenings in Rome — from filmmaker travel questions to the running order of a soirée. For most people who submit, hers is the first voice from the festival they hear, and she is known for answering quickly, plainly and with genuine care. She oversees the notification process each edition and coordinates everything selected filmmakers need to send: photographs, synopses, festival histories and film files. If the festival feels personal rather than institutional when you deal with it, that is largely her doing. She believes, like the rest of the association, that a filmmaker should never feel like a submission number.
Via Anastasio 11/372
Rome 00165, Italy