Daniela Persico is the new artistic director of the BFF40

“I am happy for this great opportunity: Bellaria has always represented for me the home of Italian independent cinema. It is a special home because it faces the sea: this is why we will try to organise a festival that is welcoming, but at the same time open to what comes from afar, bringing together those who are making underground films in Italy today with international professionals, creating a space for the authors of tomorrow and involving the audience of the future as much as possible”. 
Bellaria Film Festival’s new artistic director, Daniela Persico.

Daniela Persico (Treviso, 1981) film critic, programmer and curator, lives in Milan. After holding various positions within the Locarno Film Festival (for which she has been working since 2013), in 2018 she became part of the festival’s selection committee and since 2020 she has been Head of Special Projects, including the Festival’s spring spin-off, L’immagine e la parola and the Spring Academy. 
She is president of the Filmidee association, directs its online magazine (www.filmidee.it) and the Summer School in Sardinia. She contributes to the Festival dei Popoli’s programming in Florence and IsReal – Festival di cinema del reale in Nuoro and is a consultant for several international festivals (including Mannheim Heidelberg Film Festival and Nara Film Festival). She is part of the commission that allocates funds for films at development stage of the Piemonte Film Commission and has been among the readers for ministerial calls for projects, she teaches Film Critic and Programmer at the Scuola Civica di Cinema Luchino Visconti in Milan.
Since 2016 she has been a contributor to Paolo Mereghetti’s celebrated Dizionario dei film and has published monographs on Claire Simon (2008), Wang Bing (2011), Ross McElwee (2013) and Emmanuel Carrère (2015), as well as two books on film criticism Cinema Is Not Dead. We Are (2015) and To the Wonder – The Last Visionaries (2016). He began by writing on the Milan pages of La Repubblica and collaborating on Filmmaker Festival.