Eva Lavinia Maffei
 
Chris Bonington
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In September 1952, an important event took place in Trento to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Trentino Mountaineering Association (Società Alpinisti Trentini) and the 64th National Assembly of the Italian Alpine Club. In connection with the event, the Chairman of the Italian Alpine Club's Central Committee, Rovereto entrepreneur Amedeo Costa, had the idea of enriching an already star-studded round of meetings, lectures and photographic exhibitions by adding the "first national mountain reduced gauge film competition": it was the moment of birth of the successful Trento Film Festival, the oldest of all the international mountain, exploration and adventure festivals. From this début (when no rivals existed), its cultural impact has expanded considerably and today it is still the most important meeting place in the world for those involved with cinema, mountaineering and nature. As the posters publicising the festival over the years reveal, the event has kept pace with mankind in his growing awareness of the planet. A passion shared by people from different environments is continually inventing new ways of getting close to nature, new kinds of travel, new ways of looking as sport, adventure and personal challenge. For their part, directors and amateur film-makers tend to reflect such dizzying advances by choosing to use new techniques, not only to show vistas and landscapes, but to express the profound human sensations that are part and parcel of such enormous ventures. Even the style of direction used to tell the story is open to all kinds of experiment; the narrative line is often unpredictable and as gripping as the content, which just proves that the festival has always seen fit to invest, not only in the best products available at the time, but also in experiments which have transformed mountain films concurrently with innovations in mountaineering. The arrival in recent years of the artistic director Maurizio Nichetti, a famous actor and director well-known for his outstanding creativity, has done even more to promote the trend toward cinematographic excellence. So today the Trento Film Festival has become the goal sought after by all film-lovers. Its success is not due solely to the number of spectators, the high attendance at events, or the large number of directors and films (over 260 this year), but to the fact that some of the festival's prize-winning films – such as "Il popolo migratore" or "Touching the Void" – have been distributed commercially, thus introducing the theme of mountains, exploration and documentaries to a wider public. Thirty years after his death, the 55th Festival has chosen to pay homage to Charlie Chaplin, by presenting his masterpiece "The Gold Rush", with the soundtrack composed by Chaplin himself and played by the Haydn Orchestra. The guests of honour for an evening devoted to 30 years of exploration in the Yosemite Valley will be the UK's Chris Bonington, the only mountaineer other than Edmund Hillary to have been awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, and Alessandro Gogna. Background events will include the usual antiques fair, with rare historic books, a large selection of exhibitions in the town and, as always, the "Montagna Libri", the world's biggest exhibition on mountain books, which this year will be joined by the Turin Book Fair.
For the posters, the organisers have chosen two works by Gottfried Hofer depicting the Brenta Dolomites, often used as mountain film sets.
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