History

Rome Prisma Film Awards was founded in 2018 by Stefano Perletta and the production company Il Varco. Hosted by Cinema Azzurro Scipioni, in its first year it saw Silvano Agosti as the president of the jury, a legendary Italian director that has worked alongside the greatest Italian professionals like Ennio Morricone, Vittorio Storaro, Nicola Piovani and many others. Over the course of its second year it moved to Cinema dei Piccoli, one of the oldest movie theaters of Rome, in the heart of Villa Borghese park since 1934.

In September 2020 we embarked on a new path under the curatorship of a new artistic director, Marcello Di Trocchio. During the Covid-19 pandemic that shut down festivals all over the world, we created a monthly streaming on Twitch with a teeming community following us from every corner of the Earth. In July 2021, after the re-opening of cinemas in Italy, we moved to one of the city’s most prestigious and characteristic movie theaters, located in the historic Campo de’ Fiori square: Cinema Farnese, where we started having screenings every two months.

From January 2022 we started a little big revolution: we opened the invitation to the events not only to the Rome-based film audience, but also to all filmmakers who had submitted their own project to our festival in the months preceding the event. In this way, one edition after the other, we contributed to making the Prisma events not only film evenings different from the others, but also a real opportunity to come together for hundreds of filmmakers from all over the world, who all too often feel lost in front of the endless quantity of audiovisual products that every day, at an unstoppable speed, are made, shared and forgotten – and who also feel equally lost in front of the thousands of film festivals that all too often, rather than opportunities to meet, seem to offer laurels to be exhibited on movie posters and social media.

That’s how the Prisma Awards have organically grown into one of the most community driven festivals, gathering over the last three years alone more than 300 artists between directors, producers, actors and movie professionals, coming from all parts of Italy, Europe and the world.

From September 2022, in order to raise the quality of the events, we have started reducing their number: from six a year to three, one every four months, always at Cinema Farnese – each time showcasing short films capable of making the audience laugh, cry, in any case be moved, together in the embracing darkness of the movie hall.

During the course of six years we have received more than 17.000 film projects from 150+ countries and we’ve been reviewed more than 900 times with 5 star on FilmFreeway, thus becoming the #1 most reviewed film festival in Europe and one of the best reviewed in general.

Many of the films we’ve screened have passed through first-class festivals, like the short films August Sky by Jasmin Tenucci or Fár by Gunnur Martinsdóttir Schlüter, both winners of the Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival (2021 and 2023 editions), or Censor of Dreams by Leo Berne and Raphaël Rodriguez and Ice Merchants by João Gonzalez, both shortlisted in the Academy Awards (2022 and 2023 editions), or Nate Milton’s Eli from the official selection of Sundance Film Festival. At the same time, we are always proud to bring to the big screen also unpublished gems that we fortunately intercept and that almost nobody else shows.

We never stop collecting the best of emerging cinema, from all kinds of budgets, genres and cultural origins, and we can’t wait to see, day after day, year after year, more stimulating authors and more interested viewers to join us in this beautiful, challenging, creative journey.

These are the Rome Prisma Film Awards. We unite people, through films, in the very heart of Rome.