The ICFF’s Cristiano de Florentiis and Italy’s Spirit in Canada
By Thomas Pigeon
On a warm summer night in Toronto’s Distillery District, the screen glows warmly, filled with energy. Couples lean into each other; friends arrive with a clink of glasses; strangers become neighbours for an evening. The film is the draw, yes—but the electricity is very much human. This is the world that Cristiano de Florentiis, ICFF’s Artistic Director and Co-Founder, has built with the Italian Contemporary Film Festival, a festival that feels less like a program and more like a living piazza.
De Florentiis—journalist, cultural builder, perpetual experimenter—didn’t set out to create a cultural institution. He set out to create connection. “If you’re stuck celebrating the past only,” he says, “you risk becoming disconnected from the country you left.” His life’s work has been to keep that relationship with Italy fresh, contemporary, and alive—especially for those who carry Italy in their hearts from afar.
The story begins humbly. More than twenty years ago, de Florentiis and co-founder Maurizio Magnifico started a small cultural circle called L’Altra Italia. It was a movie club with VHS tapes brought back from Italy, plastic chairs at the Italian Institute of Culture, and evenings that continued over dinner tables. Word spread. Thirty people became hundreds; hundreds became a community. At its peak, the club reached 1,200 paying members across multiple venues. The success posed a question: had they built a circle or a wall?
“We decided to get rid of memberships and open to everyone,” de Florentiis recalls. In 2012, the ICFF was born—not simply as a showcase for contemporary Italian cinema, but as a new way to socialize culture. “Contemporary” meant more than up-to-date films. It meant an ongoing, living relationship with Italy as it is now—its design, its daring, its contradictions, its joy.
This—being together, watching a story, talking after—this should be the normality. The sense of belonging, of sharing a city, of presence. That’s what we try to give space to.
— CRISTIANO DE FLORENTIIS
The early years were scrappy, joyous, and grassroots. Budgets were tight. If they couldn’t bring the star, they’d bring “the actor who appears for five minutes”—still Italian, still a heartbeat from the film’s creation. The mission was simple and radical: say yes. Say yes to new partners, yes to new venues, yes to new audiences beyond Toronto. The festival expanded to screenings in nine cities. It built a robust youth program that drew thousands of students each spring—not just to watch foreign films, but to learn the language of cinema itself. Teachers leaned in; classrooms transformed into micro-cinematheques. “No one teaches you how to watch a movie,” de Florentiis says. “We give young people the tools—script, cinematography, story—so they can think about what they’re seeing.”
Then came 2020 and COVID.
When the world shut down, ICFF did not go dark. Instead, de Florentiis and his team did what they always do: they said yes to a wild idea. They resurrected the drive-in at Ontario Place—securing regulatory changes, partnering with CHIN Radio to broadcast the audio on FM, staging red carpets where stars rolled up in convertibles, and piping Q&As into every car via Zoom. When the credits rolled, the applause was replaced by a symphony of honking horns drifting across the lake. “It wasn’t about watching a movie,” he says. “It was the moment people felt part of a community again.”
The experience reset the festival’s purpose. Post-pandemic, ICFF doubled down on what no living room could offer: shared presence, chance encounters, the walk from the parking lot to the piazza and back again. The Distillery District became their haven. Headsets replaced speakers to elevate sound. Installations and activations turned the district into a place to wander and linger. This immersive “ICFF Village” comes alive each summer with sponsor activations—from Barilla’s pasta tastings to Campari’s vibrant aperitivo bars, and Lavazza, the presenting partner, filling the air with the aroma of authentic Italian espresso and photo booth opportunities. “Our main competitor isn’t another festival,” de Florentiis says. “It’s the living room. So, we had to make it irresistible to leave the couch.”
De Florentiis’s creative compass was formed long before Toronto. He grew up in Rome, arriving in Canada in 1997 on what he called a journalist’s dream—“a North American experience. I was working for a firm in Italy, and I thought they were sending me to New York. Instead, they said Toronto. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ I didn’t even know where Toronto was at the time,” he laughs.
What was supposed to be a year became a life. His earliest encounter with festivals came at age eleven, when his father worked in the tiny town of Giffoni. There, in a small cinema, a young Cristiano watched international films while an interpreter narrated from a booth—Cinema Paradiso in real time. “It wasn’t only the movies,” he remembers. “It was the town, the guests from abroad, the feeling of belonging. That stuck with me.”
If his imagination was seeded early, his method is all craft. “I don’t believe creativity is something you’re born with,” he says. “It’s something you build, every day. Not just ideas on paper, but with your hands—solving problems, making things real.” He is allergic to complacency and deeply pragmatic about risk. “We’re not a corporation,” he smiles. “We can assume risks. We live every day in risk mode.” He’s quick to qualify the word: risk isn’t a lottery ticket—it’s preparation, common sense, and the courage to stop doing what no longer works. In a country where the safest move is often to be “all things to all people,” de Florentiis insists that the greater danger is sameness.
Ask him about Italian cinema and you’ll get a portrait of a nation that refuses to be boxed in. Gone are the days when a single label—neorealism, commedia all’italiana—could contain the scene. Today, Italy produces across genres: action, romance, psychological drama, films that think and feel and surprise. “It’s difficult to enclose Italian cinema in one capsule,” he says. If there is a through-line, it’s a certain realism, an insistence on texture. The films may not chase every global audience—but they reward those who come close.
And people do come. The numbers are impressive—well north of 60,000 annual attendees—but numbers alone can’t capture the energy of the ICFF Village at the Distillery: the laughter between screenings, the chance meeting that turns into a business conversation, the way a stranger becomes a friend over a glass of wine. De Florentiis dreams in communities, not metrics. “What we created is not just a festival,” he says. “It’s a cultural village, driven by film, with many disciplines braided into it.” There are industry panels too—like the Milano-Cortina Olympic Committee visiting to speak before a documentary on one of Milan’s Olympic teams—and lively late-night moments like Serata, the official ICFF afterparty at the Illuminarium, where exclusively Italian music pulses through the night.
I casually mentioned my home in the village of Cetona, Italy. De Florentiis lights up. “Ahh, I had one of the best pasta dishes of my life at Osteria del Merlo in Cetona, pici al cinghiale” (the local Tuscan-style pasta with wild boar ragù). It struck me that the world is indeed a village, and Italy is a country that connects people through food, wine, and surely cinema.
So, what’s next? If the past is prologue, the future isn’t a fixed plan. ICFF will keep evolving—more cities where it makes sense, deeper youth engagement, new artistic collaborations, and formats that answer what society needs now, not yesterday. “We are not stuck in a traditional way,” he says. “If the formula stops serving the community, we’ll change it.”
He resists the idea that art should be an “escape” from a fractious world. “This—being together, watching a story, talking after—this should be the normality,” he says. “The sense of belonging, of sharing a city, of presence. That’s what we try to give space to.”
And when the festival closes, it does so with grandeur—a gala evening where cinema’s icons come to play. This year, Susan Sarandon appeared in the iconic Thelma & Louise car on stage, delivering a fiery and deeply inspiring speech that left my Co-Publisher daughter and me spellbound—a reminder of why the ICFF is as much about heart as it is about film.
As we wrap, he offers a final thought on how to “bring the magic of Italy closer to Canadians” that VeraVita celebrates. “Come to the festival—it’s a window,” he says. “But then go. Go to Italy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Go every few years. Walk an old town, sit for a long lunch, hear the language again. Keep the relationship alive.”
In the Distillery District, the film’s closing scene lands and the credits bloom across the screen. People don’t rush to their cars. They linger. They talk about what they just saw and what it stirred—memories, ideas, plans, dinner. Under the summer sky, Cristiano de Florentiis’s vision comes into focus: culture as a living conversation, cinema as the thread that ties us back—to each other, to the present, and to a country that continues to reinvent itself with style, courage, and heart. — VV
Photography provided by the ICFF
