Kino Basaglia

Basaglia on screen: film, madness, and freedom.

Kino Basaglia is part of the official programme of the European Capital of Culture 2025 Nova Gorica - Gorizia. 

Franco Basaglia was a pioneer in psychiatry who, through his work and ideas, transformed the treatment of mental patients. With his psychiatric revolution, he eradicated the system of isolation and stigmatization that patients, labeled as "mad," experienced. The inscription "Freedom is therapeutic" on the wall of the former psychiatric hospital in Trieste remains an inspiration for a more humanistic approach to mental health care.

Up Close, No One Is Normal I: 23 May 2025 at 18:00

• Abel Gardens: At a time when heated debates are taking place about the abolition of psychiatric institutions and new ways of treating patients, Sergio Zavoli travels to Gorizia to meet the director of the psychiatric hospital, Franco Basaglia, and learn about his revolutionary, innovative methods. Ten years later, on 13 May 1978, Law 180 was passed, mandating the definitive closure of psychiatric hospitals and the abolition of inhumane therapeutic methods.
• Are the Poor Mad?: The psychiatric hospital Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome is just one example of the dramatic situation faced by patients locked away in psychiatric institutions in Italy. The institution serves more as a place to remove individuals deemed unfit for life in a consumerist, profit-driven society.
• Let the Mad Be Free: In Colorno near Parma, Franco Basaglia is the director of the psychiatric hospital. He is committed to restoring dignity to the patients. He abolished electroshock therapy and opened the hospital wards. Patients can now move freely within and outside the building, communicate with the outside world, and even find suitable employment. Basaglia also talks about a case of parricide committed by a former patient.
• Unleashed: Fabio Spada is a seven-year-old boy from the Roman suburb of San Basilio, considered maladjusted at school. A lonely and powerless child, infinitely creative, he finds no understanding in society. Fabio seems to harbor no illusions about a better tomorrow: he does not believe in justice and wants to defend himself from reality in his own way.

Up Close, No One Is Normal II: 23 May 2025 at 21:00

• The Maimed Tree: A time of introducing new psychiatric methods: the inhabitants of Lamporecchio, a small community near Pistoia, encounter a completely new approach to caring for people with mental illness. Psychiatric hospitals are closing, and the community and individuals take on responsibility for the ill.
• Flight: "Basaglia invited me to Trieste because he had managed to borrow a plane from Itavia and wanted to walk through the sky with patients who had always lived in confinement. This film is a simple chronicle of one day of happiness." – Silvano Agosti

Featuring: Franco Basaglia, David Cooper, Maria Grazia Giannichedda, patients and staff of the Psychiatric Hospital in Trieste.

In collaboration with the publishing house /*cf., the screening will be followed by a discussion titled "Up Close, No One Is Normal" on the phenomenon of Franco Basaglia. The discussion will feature the curator of Kino Basaglia, Mila Lazić, along with two renowned experts in the field of anti-psychiatry and in Basaglia’s life and work, Vito Flaker and Juš Škraban.

Kino Basaglia in Gorizia, 13–15 June 2025, Basaglia Park, Gorizia

13 June 2025 at 21:00

• Song of the Mad: This song is a hymn to madness, diversity and creativity, celebrating “the mad as people who express themselves through art, looking beyond conventional reality.
• We Are the Errors: In the 1970s, Claudio Misculin founded in Trieste the Accademia della Follia – Academy of Madness, a theatre company made up of »madmen by profession and actors by vocation«. Even after its founder's sudden passing, the Academy continues its work and remains a unique experience on the international stage.

14 June 2025 at 21:00

• Cantico dei matti: This song is a hymn to madness, diversity and creativity, celebrating “the mad as people who express themselves through art, looking beyond conventional reality.
• The Gardens of Abel: At a time when heated debates are taking place about the abolition of psychiatric institutions and new ways of treating patients, Sergio Zavoli travels to Gorizia to meet the director of the psychiatric hospital, Franco Basaglia, and learn about his revolutionary, innovative methods. Ten years later, on 13 May 1978, Law 180 was passed, mandating the definitive closure of psychiatric hospitals and the abolition of inhumane therapeutic methods.
• The Open Door: “Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.” (Primo Levi: If This Is a Man) A documentary filmed at the Psychiatric Hospital of Gorizia.
• Imaginary Correspondences: A participatory public art project by artist Mariangela Capossela, focusing on recovering the letters written by patients of Italian psychiatric hospitals in the first half of the 20th century – letters that were systematically withheld and never delivered, as all communication between patients and the outside world was routinely denied.

15 June 2025 at 21:00

• Song of the Mad: This song is a hymn to madness, diversity and creativity, celebrating “the mad as people who express themselves through art, looking beyond conventional reality.
• The Second Shadow: “The film was originally meant to be titled The Wall, because I wanted to tell the story of that almost fairytale-like moment when Basaglia told his 1,200 patients,  'Let's tear down this wall so people can see what the asylum really is.' I constructed this fable of extraordinary characters who decide to tear down the physical barrier separating them from the outside world, hoping in vain that all the other barriers might fall too.” (Silvano Agosti at the National Seminar “Mental Health and Social Stigma”, 2005)

10 July 2025, at 21:15, Divača

• Il volo (directed by Silvano Agosti, Italy, 1975, 32’)
• Cantico dei matti (directed by Bianca D’Aponte and Claudio Misculin, Italy, 2002, music video, 3')
• Trieste Racconta Basaglia (directed by Erika Rossi, Italy, 2012, 54’), guest: Erika Rossi

Letni kino Silvana Furlana: 31 July 2025 at 21:00, in front of the Nova Gorica Town Hall

• Specijalno vaspitanje (directed by Goran Marković, Yugoslavia, 1977, 110’), guest: Goran Marković

Festival I mille occhi: 12–17 September 2025, Trieste

• More information on the programme will be available at the end of July.

1 and 2 October 2025, Slovenska kinoteka, Ljubljana

1 October 2025

• La favola del serpente (directed by Pilkko Peltonen, Finland, 1968, production: Yleisradio, RAI. 16mm, B&N (digitalised) 29'), guest: Pilkko Peltonen
• Trieste Racconta Basaglia (directed by Erika Rossi, Italia, 2012, 54’), guest: Erika Rossi

2 October 2025

• The Bridge on the River Kwa (directed by David Lean, USA, 1957, 135’)

YOU CAN REGISTER FOR THE EVENTS AT THIS LINK.