A shadow follows everything: it signals presence and, at the same time, loss; it is what slips beyond the light yet retains its shape. It is the realm of the unseen — of what history has silenced, what memory has

misplaced, what research sometimes fails to reveal. And it is also the part that lives within us — fears, desires, thoughts pushed aside — that only attentive listening can draw back to the surface.

In the ancient world, as in cinema, shadow is not absence but depth: a threshold where forgotten voices return, where small gestures and lives pushed to the margins of time re-emerge. It shelters those figures that light tends to exclude: women, minorities, unconventional or non-conforming perspectives, fragments that refuse to fit the dominant narrative.

From this awareness comes the theme of the 15th edition of our festival, which this year unfolds across two cities — Catania and Licodia Eubea — twin places of the soul that look at and reflect one another, face and counter-face of a single journey of exploration and dialogue. Not division, but a passage that multiplies perspectives. The official poster echoes this play of reflections: a double-faced image, suspended between the serene gaze of a kore and the unsettling vitality of a daimon brimming with life and mystery.

Thirty one Italian and international films — including world, national, and regional premieres — together with talks and special events, will give voice and substance to this reflection, offering audiences a constel-

lation of stories, languages, and perspectives: the many shapes of the unseen. Because every light needs its shadow in order to exist.

And perhaps it is precisely there, where vision falters, that true knowl- edge begins.