Ipotesi Cinema reborn in Bologna, in 2003, as the moment at the same time complementary and alternative to the traditional university education, and led to Ipotesi Cinema Training. Bologna is the historic seat of DAMS but also home to the Film Library of Bologna, whose activities on the national and international territory, give it the capacity to accommodate this structure.
The school method provides a collective workshop, “Station for the memory,” in which all the participants involved in the activities of writing, directing, shooting and editing. The teachers do not transmit knowledge but through the unfolding of experience. The goal is to become “authors” and not just professionals. Ermanno Olmi speaks of it as a tavern or an art workshop, in which we learn “by doing” in a dimension of dialogue, exchange of ideas and creative energies.
In 2004, the school and the Film Library of Bologna, in collaboration with Rai3, produce a short film, ‘O sole mio – Self-Italian-Portrait’, with a duration of 53 minutes, presented at the Venice Film Festival 2004 as a special event in the “Short Films”. The work is a Ermanno Olmi’s project and it was made by twenty-six boys in the school as a collective assembly of the films made during the workshop.
This was followed by various jobs including in 2012 the documentary “How I wish it were my future,” presented at the Venice Film Festival 2012. Ermanno Olmi and Maurizio Zaccaro have developed this project with students of the last five years of the laboratory. The hundreds of interviews conducted around Italy, selected and mounted, have now become a movie that offers a glimpse of the significant expectations, hopes, disappointments and fears.