The Case for a Calabrian Library
Field Research · Facilitation · Education
For a month, in a team of five we drove 3,038 kilometers across Calabria, running stop-motion workshops in seven schools with 147 students. La Guarimba, the film festival behind the program, had a government grant to teach children film. I was its scientific supervisor, and I decided to run field research alongside the teaching.
The workshops produced 28 short films. The research produced something slower. A year later, La Guarimba built a cultural center in Amantea around the needs the interviews had named.
Five days, one film
Each workshop ran five days, one stage a day: story, characters, animation, sound, screening. Students worked in teams drawn at random, four or five to a film, and by Friday every team had one.
The films were the point on paper. Asked what they had actually learned, the students mostly named each other.
Nearly a third pointed to collaboration, unprompted, ahead of filmmaking itself. The teams they had not chosen, awkward at first, were doing the real teaching.
What the interviews kept naming
Alongside the workshops I interviewed thirteen people who see these children every day: teachers, principals, a school psychologist, a social worker. The same picture kept forming.
Few opportunities, so the ambitious leave, to build something, you have to leave. Little for young people outside school hours, and nothing that does not cost money. One of them put the gap plainly:
When kids leave school, their only stimulation comes from the family, and it usually costs money. Those who can afford it, do; those who can't, don't. That's where the divisions start. All it would take is a room, a cultural center. It just doesn't exist.
A year later, the room exists
In August 2024, La Piccola Biblioteca di Amantea opened: a free study space with fast internet and computers, a library, a room for screenings and events, and a small music studio.
In 2025, its first full year, the library drew 2,381 users and ran 92 activities for children and adults. That February it joined Italy's national library network, its catalog searchable across the country.
The research did not end in a report. It ended in a place children can walk into.
Written up by La Guarimba and by the Italian Association of Trainers.
