Cinema at the Museum, the summer festival promoted by ISRE, brings the big screen to the Museum of Sardinian Life and Popular Traditions in Nuoro. Three screenings, Monday, August 3rd, Thursday, August 6th, and Monday, August 10th, 2026, all at 8:30 pm, offer a journey through the island's landscape, memory, and identity through the eyes of four Sardinian filmmakers.
A documentary on fire and the rebirth of nature, an animated short that entrusts a thousand-year-old tree with the story of the island's history, the choral tale of a popular exodus, an essential fable about the time of peasant work: four different ways of looking at Sardinia and of restoring its voices, gestures and landscapes.
The festival opens on Monday, August 3rd with Enrico Pau 's L'ombra del fuoco / S'umbra 'e su fogu . The blackened landscape of Montiferru unfolds before the camera after the great fire of July 24th and 25th, 2021, which devastated approximately thirteen thousand hectares of pastures, woods, and centuries-old olive groves. For a year, Enrico Pau followed the seasons of fire: he collected the voices of those who care for that land, he listened to the songs, he recorded, after the pain, the slow miracle of nature sprouting again. Following this will be S'ozzastru by Carolina Melis (2023, color, 8 min.), an animated short film written by Elisa Guidelli and narrated by Claudia Aru, which tells the story of a thousand-year-old tree: a resilient ambassador of nature and a silent witness to history. Beneath its branches, the lives of men and women flow, often unaware of how intertwined their existence is with its presence.
<p>An image from The Shadow of Fire</p>On Thursday, August 6th, Michele Badas and Michele De Murtas 's "Deu ci seu" will be screened. In June 1997, approximately twenty thousand people traveled from Sardinia to Naples to watch a soccer match where only one outcome was possible: victory. It was the playoff between Cagliari and Piacenza for Serie A qualification. Through archival footage and testimonies from those who were there, the documentary reconstructs the exodus of an entire island mobilizing to support one of the symbols of its identity: not only what happened on the field, but also the search for the ships, the crossing, the wait, and the defeat.
Monday, August 10th, it will be Salvatore Mereu 's Bentu 's turn. Raffaele has just harvested the small pile of wheat that will last him a whole year. For days, he's been sleeping in the countryside, away from everyone, waiting for the wind to come and help him separate the grains from the chaff. But the wind refuses to show up. Only Angelino comes to visit him every day. One day, perhaps, when he's grown up, he'll be able to ride Raffaele's indomitable mare. But Angelino doesn't want to wait.
(Unioneonline/AD)