These are the quotes that animate the third edition of “𝐌𝐚𝐓𝐢𝐅𝐅”, the 2022 Matera International Film Festival. These words allude to dance, but not necessarily to the discipline or form of dance, but to the attitude, the metaphor of ambitions, the act of detaching oneself from the earth to look beyond, surpassing the imagination and transforming it into reality. Never before has dance been so associated with lightness, as a dewdrop slides down the mountainside at dawn. The drop of lightness and serenity that humanity needs now more than ever.

And what movement can express this feeling better than the Moonwalk, Michael Jackson’s signature move in which he moved free of gravity and free of the earth’s atmosphere, as if he were literally on the moon? The lunar missions, the Moon as a female satellite, a matriarchal symbol, just as the Materan civilization was secretly and profoundly matriarchal; the Harvest Moon, and the Moon of love, of cyclical and curable wounds; the Moon over Kiev.

The human condition consists in breaking away from the chains of the heart, and it is that heart which is the salvation of human beings when they desire what lies beyond, when they desire introspection and common sense and a logical sustainability of their actions – immediately before embarking on new missions. These lunar and terrestrial thoughts — human, female, Matera — will be the background, in a broad sense, to the works of art that are part of this spiritual journey and will be sent to 𝐌𝐚𝐓𝐢𝐅𝐅 to be evaluated by the Jury in the 𝐌𝐚𝐓𝐢𝐅𝐅 Competition 2022.