Author: Alessandro Arnold

From 13 to 16 November, the 32nd edition of the Libero Bizzarri Award was held at the Museo del Mare Hall in San Benedetto del Tronto. This year, the central theme of the event—organized by the Libero Bizzarri Foundation in collaboration with the Marche Region and the Directorate-General for Cinema and Audiovisual of the MIC—was creative intelligence and new forms of storytelling. Through debates, talks, and screenings, the festival explored a highly topical thread: the role and influence of artificial intelligence in the world of cinema.

Among the scheduled events, one was particularly significant for AANT. On Friday the 14th, at the Academy’s headquarters in Rome, sociologist Derrick De Kerckhove—member of AANT’s Scientific Committee and its geniaLAB HUB—and Gianna Angelini, Scientific Director and Head of Internationalization at the Academy in Rome, took the stage. The meeting, titled “Connective Intelligence: the Impact of Media on Humans and Society,” also included the screening of the episode “McLuhan’s Electronic Village”, which examines the thinking of the renowned scholar through technological applications used in the fields of mass media and telecommunications.

The screening of Libero Bizzarri’s documentary provided the catalyst for an intense and multifaceted dialogue between Gianna Angelini and Derrick De Kerckhove. Prof. Angelini recalled how McLuhan redefined the categories through which we interpret modern communication, paving the way for a new sensitivity toward the media environment. Yet it fell to the next generation—De Kerckhove’s—to confront the emergence of the digital revolution, a territory McLuhan had only glimpsed and theorized.

During the conversation, Angelini described De Kerckhove as McLuhan’s “methodological and intellectual heir,” a scholar capable of expanding insights that are now more relevant than ever in the age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic pervasiveness. Revisiting McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message,” De Kerckhove underlined how it is not content that transforms us, but the medium itself—which reshapes perception, social bonds, and cognitive structures. From this premise arises his research on neuroculture, the discipline that investigates cognitive changes generated by new media environments.

The screening of Bizzarri’s documentary also brought back the voice and face of a strikingly contemporary McLuhan, capable of foreseeing the trajectory of technological transformations decades in advance. The recovered images, shown once again to the public, confirmed how essential his thought remains today for understanding not only the media but the very structure of contemporary experience.

The festival concluded on Sunday with the awards ceremony for the ITALIADOC and Opera Prima competitions—the latter dedicated to filmmakers under 35—along with the Andrea Pazienza Award for inventive use of images and graphics, the Libero Bizzarri Award for Best Documentary, and the Under 35 Audience Award.