There was a time when cinema linked to nature and the mountains limited itself to cataloging species and describing habitats, reassuring the viewer with the detached majesty of traditional documentaries. Today, faced with the global impact of the ecological crisis and the saturation of very high definition images that risk clouding our gaze, environmental narration has had to make a leap of species: it is no longer a question of explaining fauna or flora, but of describing the complexity of the relationships between man, other living beings and the territories in which they coexist.
In this scenario of profound linguistic and cultural metamorphosis, the Gran Paradiso Film Festival presents itself as one of the longest-running and original experiences on the international scene. Born in 1984 in the heart of Italy’s first National Park and grown to become a permanent laboratory of innovation and collective reflection, the festival has demonstrated that the mountain has never been a mere scenographic backdrop, but a true infrastructure of meaning capable of generating attention, responsibility and community. Faced with the challenges of a narrative that continually changes and the need to overcome the “bulimic” tourism model in favor of an in-depth experience, it becomes essential to understand how nature cinema is moving and what answers it can offer to the present, but above all to the future. Guiding us through these steep and winding mountain paths is Luisa Vuillermozdirector of Fondation Grand Paradis and creative soul of the festival.
The Gran Paradiso Film Festival is among the longest running in the wildlife sector in Italy. Looking at the path taken and the future, how has the role of nature cinema evolved and what expressive challenges must it face today to continue to raise public awareness about biodiversity and the relationship between man and nature?
The Gran Paradiso Film Festival was born in 1984 thanks to Gabriele Caccialanza, a university professor from Pavia who frequented Cogne. It was a time when nature cinema was still largely documentary-descriptive: fauna was shown, nature was “explained”. He started from a great intuition: to tell the story of wild nature in the first Italian national park, and this is still one of the keys to his success today. It was a very original and innovative idea, as well as being consistent with the vocation of the area.
In 42 years that language has profoundly transformed, and the Festival has gone through this transformation from the inside. First of all, with my arrival as creative director, the geographical boundaries expanded from Cogne to the entire Gran Paradiso. Furthermore, with the sad advent of Covid, a further intuition was to create the website dedicated to the event: in such a difficult period, the decision to create an online edition of the Gran Paradiso Film Festival meant giving back space to nature to reflect on what was happening.
Today nature films no longer just tell species and habitats: they tell relationships. Relationships between living beings, between man and the environment, between local and global. Contemporary nature cinema has enormously evolved in technique and storytelling: it is no coincidence that today directors such as Vincent Munier or Pippa Ehrlich win awards such as the César or the Oscar. The nature film is in all respects cinema, no longer a separate “green” theme, but one of the keys to understanding our way of being in the world.
In Italy, there are still festivals dedicated to environmental cinema, but, in celebrating the beauty of nature to inspire its conservation, the Gran Paradiso one undoubtedly remains one of the most creative and singular.
The greatest expressive challenge today is twofold. On the one hand, don’t give in to the saturation of the image: we live submerged in very high definition videos of nature, and this risks (paradoxically) anesthetizing the gaze. Serious naturalistic cinema must return to asking for time, attention, silence – let’s think about 2000 Days in Paradise of Lapied, eighteen years of stakeouts in the Gran Paradiso, more than 2000 days in the field to restore a fauna that almost no one sees, a film that the GPFF Online audience chose as the winner of this 29th edition: it is a manifesto of method, even before that of poetics. And the narrative technique of films has also changed: we talk more and more about the relationship between man and nature, the idea of the traditional documentary has been abandoned with much more storytelling.
On the other hand, the challenge is narrative: we need to talk about the ecological crisis without overwhelming it with the rhetoric of alarm, which paralyzes, nor with that of consolatory wonder, which removes responsibility. The films that really work today — I think of Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey by Pippa Ehrlich, winner of this edition’s Golden Ibex, and to all of his work, to which we have dedicated the 2026 Legacy Award — manage to hold together scientific rigor, empathy and civil commitment, transforming knowledge into change. The event, in any case, has always grown in terms of participation, also thanks to the expansion of the themes (not only cinema, but also collective reflections on current topics). In 2026, compared to the previous year, attendance grew by as much as 33 percent, confirming this positive trend.
The screenings and activities take place in the Park territory. How much does the choice of an Alpine stage affect the spectator’s experience compared to a traditional film festival in the city?
Everything changes, and one thing in particular changes: there is a relationship with places. Watching a nature film in the Gran Paradiso area means perceiving a continuity between what happens on the screen and the landscape that surrounds us. The distance between what you see and what you experience disappears. In the city, a nature film is an aesthetic experience; here is an experience of recognition.
The Gran Paradiso National Park is not a scenic backdrop, it is part of the story. The screenings take place in numerous widespread locations – Cogne, Introd, Rhêmes-Notre-Dame, Rhêmes-Saint-Georges, Valsavarenche, Villeneuve, Aymavilles – inside theatres, castles, ancient ruins, visitor centres. The spectator does not “go to the festival”: he travels through a territory, meets the communities that live there, tastes the Gran Paradiso Quality Mark products. This produces a density of meaning that a city hall, however prestigious, cannot replicate: the mountain becomes an instrument that generates attention. And attention, today, is the scarcest cultural resource.
The Aosta Valley is associated with the idea of mountains, but there are different ways of mountaineering: Mont Blanc is linked to mountaineering, Cervinia to skiing, Cogne is the capital of the Gran Paradiso National Park. There is therefore a Valle d’Aosta that is strong especially in summer, associated with nature: we think that more than 30% of the regional territory is protected. For this reason, it was right to develop the festival in such an evocative and identifying place. This is also why it was so successful.
What is Fondation Grand Paradis’s strategy to combine the conservation of the environment and symbolic species with the tourist and cultural promotion of the area?
We do not think through opposition between protection and promotion, but through integration. Our belief, which is both cultural and managerial, is that a territory is preserved if you know it, and you know it if you know how to describe it well. Tourism can be the destruction or salvation of a certain place. For a region like Valle d’Aosta, which can only manage small numbers, we need to focus on quality and in-depth tourism. The Festival is one of the tools through which Fondation Grand Paradis builds a narrative of the Gran Paradiso that is contemporary, scientific and accessible: cinema brings the public into complex themes – coexistence with large predators, as in Luigi Boitani’s reflection – and transforms the visit into awareness.
Around the Festival we have built an ecosystem that works all year round: the widespread and permanent exhibition Life around me by Donato Savin, who brings contemporary art to the landscape of Cogne, dialoguing with the mining memory and the fauna symbolizing the Park; the photography competition The wild moment; collaborations with the Gran Paradiso National Park, the Compagnia Valdostana delle Acque, IUCN, LIPU, the Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Alpine Convention; and the “digital keys” of the territory – the Visit Gran Paradiso app and the Sibilla del Gran Paradiso, our multilingual digital human who accompanies the visitor before, during and after the trip.
It is a strategy that holds three words together: identity, knowledge, cooperation. Tourist and cultural promotion does not come before or after conservation: it is a function of it.
Many Alpine regions address the issue of social and economic sustainability of internal territories. What contribution can major cultural events such as the Gran Paradiso Film Festival make to the estate of local communities?
The internal Alpine territories, crucial for the sustainability of the entire country, are not supported only by infrastructure or economic incentives. They stand up if the people who live there feel that their place has value, and if those arriving from outside recognize that value. Major cultural events serve exactly this: they are intangible community infrastructures.
The Gran Paradiso Film Festival, in eighteen days, mobilizes 8 municipalities and many economic operators such as accommodation facilities, restaurateurs, guides, young mountaineers – let’s think of the Cordata 4061 project with fifteen young people from the Aosta Valley who made three short films at high altitude. The communities are not passive spectators: they are co-authors of the festival, with their spaces, their products, their knowledge. And the public who participates does not consume the territory, they inhabit it for a few days. This changes the type of tourism, but it also changes the way the inhabitants look at themselves.
A long-lived international festival like ours – 29 editions in 42 years – becomes part of the identity heritage of the Valley: it is a source of pride for communities at risk of depopulation, and an instrument of international attraction and visibility. It does not alone solve the issue of social sustainability of the highlands, but demonstrates that high cultural quality is compatible – indeed, it is necessary – even in small places. As the mountains teach: you climb by choosing the quality of the route, not the quantity of steps.
What type of tourism do you imagine for the future of Gran Paradiso and Valle d’Aosta, compared to that of today?
I imagine a tourism that stops being measured only in numbers and begins to be measured in relationships. Today the dominant paradigm – the one we have seen degenerate in the Dolomites – is extractive tourism: the landscape is consumed, an image is taken away, little is left. It is not tourism that the Aosta Valley needs, and it is not tourism that our mountains can handle.
The future I imagine for Gran Paradiso is in-depth, competent, curious tourism. An audience that chooses to come here not even though nature is difficult, but because nature is difficult: because it requires time, silence, respect. A tourist who informs himself before leaving – perhaps by talking to the Sibyl of Gran Paradiso -, who chooses less traveled routes through the Visit Gran Paradiso app, who sees a film at the Festival and then walks in the places that film depicted, who sleeps in our independent structures and eats local products. A tourist who agrees to be accompanied inside a genius locinot just served.
Nature cinema, conservation, excellent hospitality and digital innovation are the four levers on which we rely. But the real challenge is another: to make Gran Paradiso a place that is not visited, but crossed; which is not consumed, it is understood. Because if the great mountains of the world have a future, it will not be written by the numbers of arrivals: it will be written by the gaze of those who return home a little changed.
