Italian community cinemas and their post-pandemic role in fragile territories

The essay provides a reflection and proposal, based on previous research, about the revitalisation of the Italian Catholic Church’s Community Cinemas network, often located in fragile territories: marginal, rural, suburban areas and significant metropolitan areas outskirts. Community Cinemas are not just merely a projection room, but rather small and diffused cultural epicentres, deeply rooted in the Italian culture and resilient to the crisis of movie theatres and cultural services exacerbated by the pandemic. Considering their value and their distribution in the Italian territory, the Community Cinema model seems to be fitting with the post-COVID-19 scenario and policy agenda: in the urban areas it can offer a community and recreational space closer to where inhabitants live, in line with recent proposals for a 15-minutes city. In the Italian inner areas, it can contribute to repopulation policies based not only on the provision of basic services, but of a new social and cultural infrastructure.