Accessibility and Sustainability
Alpe Adria Cinema and the Trieste Film Festival are committed to providing a safe, sustainable and accessible environment for everyone, where anyone can feel free to express themselves whilst always respecting those around them.
Alpe Adria Cinema and the Trieste Film Festival promote and implement a range of initiatives with the aim of fostering and encouraging sustainable and accessible attitudes and spaces:
- • promoting and using inclusive language that opposes all forms of discrimination;
- • the venues of the Trieste Film Festival are accessible to people with physical disabilities, and some events are dedicated to people with sensory disabilities;
- • the festival is also accessible to younger generations: there is a whole section of the festival, the “TSFF OF THE LITTLE ONES”, dedicated solely to an audience of children and young people, featuring family screenings, educational workshops and guided tours around the city, all tailored to children;
- • The festival promotes and encourages mindful food choices and offers guests locally sourced, vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free products;
- • The festival provides shared transport for guests arriving at airports and encourages the use of public transport to reach cinemas, restaurants and event venues; during the event, everyone travels mainly on foot or by public transport;
- • The festival merchandise is made from recycled materials, usually salvaged from previous festival installations and produced by a social enterprise (https://www.listersartoriasociale.it/)
We invite you to read on to find out more about what we do:
ACCESSIBILITY
Our collaborations
We renew our collaboration with the Luchetta Foundation every year because we believe that culture is a right for everyone. For us, accessibility also means bringing cinema beyond the city center: throughout the year we organize screenings and activities for adults and children, involving the entire community.
We also organize screenings dedicated to people with sensory disabilities, made possible thanks to the collaboration with Federico Spoletti’s InCinema project. The Trieste Film Festival is not only a place of cinema, but a space for meeting, confrontation and participation, where each* can feel welcome, respected and the protagonist of a shared experience.
Inclusive communication
We believe in the importance of communication that welcomes rather than divides: we use neutral and respectful language that recognizes and values the diversity of identities, experiences, and backgrounds within our community. We acknowledge that achieving this goal requires care and time, and we are committed to working toward it. Likewise, we want our channels to use language that does not discriminate or incite hatred in any form. We ask our community to respect this principle and to refrain from using inappropriate or offensive language or engaging in personal attacks.
For little girls and little boys
Films for toddlers and children, when possible, are shown without flashing images so as not to cause discomfort to more sensitive individuals. Films selected for toddlers and young children are silent, with no spoken dialogue and accompanied only by sound and music. This feature promotes an accessible and enjoyable viewing experience for all and everyone, especially facilitating participation even for audiences with difficulties in reading or language comprehension, different attention spans, or hearing disabilities.
Accessibility to Festival venues
At the cinema and festival meeting places, our constantly trained staff is ready to offer discreet and attentive support. Festival-affiliated accommodations are designed to ensure physical accessibility, with facilitated routes for people with reduced mobility.
We are committed to making public the descriptions of the different locations of the Festival, with all the information needed to plan the arrival and stay in the theaters.
In particular, one of our main locations, the Miela Theater, has initiated a series of interventions aimed at ensuring, in addition to the removal of architectural barriers, the enjoyment of the space and cultural offerings to an increasing number of people. The magnetic induction system (hearing-loop), the tactile floor and map, and the LETISmart system have been installed(https://www.miela.it/info/)
SUSTAINABILITY
Alpe Adria Cinema’s green policy aims at a series of resource-saving and climate-friendly measures.
Environmental sustainability is taken into account both during the conduct of the festival and during its preparation phase and in the course of the various activities that the association carries out throughout the year in the areas of, for example, mobility, catering, or waste reduction and careful use of resources.
Within our team we always try to keep sustainable strategies and methods in mind in our daily activities. In addition to ecological aspects, intensive personal contact with all festival partners, sponsors and funders is very important to us in order to ensure long-term collaboration as partners, thus specifically supporting sustainable attitudes.
During the organization of the Trieste Film Festival and during its course, environmental and sustainability aspects are implemented through various practices:
Mobility
For our and our guests, we prefer sustainable travel solutions wherever possible, such as trains and pick-up services in sharing mode, to significantly decrease travel. We recommend that festival goers travel to event venues by bus, bicycle and on foot. On our website and in our materials (e.g., on the venue program) we point out bus routes near the event venues and the nearest bike sharing stations (Bits).
Transportation of goods and materials is crucial to the organization of the event. We do our best to arrange all transportation at once, to rely on alternative means of transportation, or to give sensible CO2 offsets when it comes to transporting film copies.
Catering
We offer our and our guests products from the local supply chain and km0, favoring organic, fair, and seasonal foods, and we collaborate with sponsors, caterers, and restaurants that share these principles; we avoid the use of single-use plastic tableware and promote constant recycling, carefully planning quantities to reduce food waste.
Printing materials
– use of recycled or FSC-certified paper for promotional materials and printed materials, while still reducing print runs;
– reduction of printing of materials with predilection and in some cases total use of digital materials;
– collaboration with printers in the area who ensure printing on certified paper.
Alpe Adria Cinema and the Trieste Film Festival also made a concrete contribution to the topic of environmental sustainability by organising two events:
1) Online panel, on the occasion of the 33rd edition of the Trieste Film Festival in January 2022, organized in collaboration with Creative Europe – Media Desk Italy, entitled ” The Greener the Better – towards sustainable cultural events and film festivals”, with the participation of the following speakers: Bruno Zambardino (Ministry of Culture), Lauriane Bertand (EU Commission – Media), Laura Zumiani (head of the Green working table for AFIC), Lia Furxhi (Cinemambiente Torino), Guillaume Calop (Les Arcs Film Festival – MIOB Network), Nevona Satta (Sardegna Film Commission)
The full panel, in English, can be seen at this link.
2) Panel held in presence, during the 35thTrieste Film Festival in January 2024, entitled “Let’s Go! 2025: European Capitals of Culture and Great Sustainable And Accessible Events” organised in collaboration with the Department of Culture of Friuli Venezia Giulia – Central Directorate for Culture and Sports – Cultural Activities Service and in which 5 European capitals of culture were called to tell about their experience and actions in the field of sustainability. The protagonists of the meeting: Esch-Sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), Veszprém – Balaton (Hungary), Timișoara (Romania), Eleusis (Greece) and GO! 2025 Nova Gorica – Gorizia: The speeches of these capitals were aimed at telling how they have engaged and are organizing themselves in the management of cultural events with regard to sustainability and accessibility towards the most fragile groups.
The full panel can be seen at this link.
The Trieste Film Festival was also part of the working table on green issues convened by AFIC (Association of Italian Film Festivals), contributing to the drafting of the guidelines for sustainable festivals, which then also became part of the Ministry of Culture’s call for promotion.
At this link you can read the guidelines drafted by AFIC and you can see videos and photos of the green training days organized in Rome during the MIA, in which the Trieste Film Festival actively participated:
https://www.aficfestival.it/festival-green/
