Special Mention Fondazione Italia Patria della Bellezza: Do you want to become a seeker of enchantment?

Fondazione Italia Patria della Bellezza rewards the "Would you like to become a seeker of enchantment?" project of the Liceo Scacchi in Bari with a special mention, offering the initiative a visibility prize on its communication channels.

The project “Seekers of Emotions” aims to develop emotional competence among young people. It wants to stimulate the aptitude for inner listening in order to then manage the emotions one feels in the right way, the good and the bad ones, giving them a name. The project involved a series of seminars - held by a pedagogue, an urban sociologist and a number of professionals from the various arts of filmmaking - aimed at recognising the Emotions in which urban places, the arts, and life are imbued. The synthesis of this multifaceted vision is the soul of a fiction series, in the urban-fantasy genre, entitled ‘Seekers of Enchantment’, the pilot episode of which was realised thanks to ministerial funds.

The Series tells of a Romantic School that for two centuries now has been teaching its special students how to recognise positive and negative emotions. Its mission is to continuously offer humans the names of Enchantment: the emotions stimulated by beautiful urban and natural places. Only in this way can humans, by constantly nourishing themselves with beauty, ward off the negative and toxic emotions that a mysterious “agency of power” spreads among them.

This challenge has found the decisive support of Chiara Conte, the courageous and innovative Headmistress of the Liceo Scientifico “Arcangelo Scacchi” in Bari. The Pilot Episode of the series, written and directed by Michele Lanubile, was realised thanks to the ‘A. Scacchi’ High School as the winner of the CIPS 2022/2023 Call for Proposals, promoted by the MiC and MIM Ministries, and with the contribution of the Fondazione Puglia. The Pilot Episode won 1st prize in the ‘Best TV & Series’ category at the New York City International Films Infest Festival (NYCIFIF) 2024.

The challenge is still to come: in addition to the search for funding to realise the entire 8-episode series ‘Seekers of Enchantment’, it combines the transmedia interaction of viewers through the crowdsourcing project ‘Would you like to be a Seeker of Enchantment?’. The project aims to involve young people from Italy, Europe and around the world to virtually become part of the Romantic School narrated in the TV series and to become Seekers of Enchantment themselves. All they have to do is film themselves with a smartphone while naming the Enchantment of the Beautiful Places, natural and urban, that they love. The short videos made will form the Map of the Enchantment of Places in Italy: when residents and tourists of all ages feel the need to feed on a precise Emotion of Beauty, they will be able to visit a precise Place on the Map and feed on that precise Enchantment. The Emotions of Enchantment are as infinite as the Beautiful Places of Italy are infinite.