Join The Matthew staff at the 2023 Ferrara Journalism Festival celebrating the 30th anniversary of the acclaimed Internazionale magazine.

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By Annalucia Scotto di Clemente / Matthew staff || Edited by Marouso Pappa

“Internazionale a Ferrara” is a journalism festival organized by the Municipality of Ferrara and the magazine Internazionale, in collaboration with ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana) Ferrara. The event takes place in the Ferrara, region annually during the first weekend of October. The first edition of the festival dates back to 2007 when the magazine Internazionale, an independent weekly news magazine founded in 1993,  together with the Municipality of Ferrara decided to organize a journalism event, promoting meetings and debates with the most significant journalists, writers, economists and cartoonists of our times.  

The three-day festival, offers many areas of debate, conferences, and lectures, specifically focused on global current issues, ensuring the public a wide choice of initiatives. Meetings with journalists are held in the conference rooms located inside the historic center of Ferrara and, in some instances, the debates take place in public places such as bars or cafes where the public can interact directly with journalists. 

In 2007, when the festival was still a niche event, it recorded a remarkable and unexpected success with over 17,000 visitors. In 2017, at its eleventh edition, the Internazionale festival was able to count on the influx of about 76,000 visitors, with a schedule of over 270 guests and 130 meetings. 

This year’s edition of the festival celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Internazionale magazine’s founding in 1993, and its contributions of select articles from the international press translated into Italian. The festival featured 115 meetings and 12 workshops, with speakers and guests from Italy, Libya, Ukraine, the United States, Canada, and other English-speaking countries. Journalists, writers, activists, and artists from all over the world met the festival audience with audio-documentary and international documentary reviews, along with book presentations and workshops for students. For the first time, JCU’s newspaper club, the Matthew represented the university at the Festival taking part in conferences, workshops, and activities all held against the backdrop of the beautiful city of Ferrara. 

Among the Italian premieres of the documentary Mondovisioni, “Praying for Armageddon” which sheds light on the link between Christian fundamentalism and the national and foreign politics of the United States. In the documentaries “20 Days in Mariupol” and “The Lost Souls of Syria” we are granted insight into the point of view of the victims and international responsibilities in two very close wars. “Theatre of Violence,” tells the controversy of the trial for crimes against humanity to Dominic Ongwen, kidnapped by a Ugandan rebel group that trains him, still a child, to be a soldier and then entrusts him with a leadership role.

The festival became a stage where journalists from all over the world took turns to share. It was for the first time in Ferrara that the journalist Keegan Hamilton told of the recent spread of synthetic opioids in the United States, the screenwriter Francesca Manieri explained how to deconstruct the relationship between female and male through porn culture, the historian of Timothy Garton Ash who retraced the history of Europe to understand the challenges of the present, interviewed by Cecilia Sala (a journalist specializing in podcasts).  

The festival was a great opportunity for training and teaching. It was a moment of sharing concern for communities, where Internazionale made itself available to its audience by showing in several conferences the processes of making the magazine while accepting questions and curiosities from its audience. Internazionale has created a space for aspiring journalists to intermingle and become catapulted into a world that always leaves room for emotions, stories, and observations of human beings.