Over the course of the industry round table entitled ‘New Perspectives – Building a shared ecosystem for circulating documentaries’, held on the final day of Pordenone Docs Fest (running 25 – 29 March), a spotlight was shone on an increasingly obvious paradox: on the one hand, documentaries are experiencing a phase of significant growth in Italian cinemas, but, on the other, most of these works still meet with colossal challenges when they attempt to reach audiences in the flesh.

The gathering was opened by Marco Fortunato, Cinemazero’s head of programming, who reiterated the approach taken by his festival’s industry sidebar over the years, which consists of “trying to bring concrete solutions to the table” rather than limiting action to theoretical discussions, and focusing on the connections between the various segments of the sector and on straightforward tools which can make life easier for cinema operators, directors and small distributors.

It’s essential, however, to start with the numbers. In this respect, Cinetel CEO Giorgio Bigoni painted a highly encouraging picture: in 2025, documentaries earned over €11.6 million at the Italian box office and attracted over 1.5 million viewers, which is the best result in the history of Cinetel data. The figures revealed in Pordenone also indicate that documentaries accounted for 2.4% of total market revenue and 23.4% of new releases, with 419 titles distributed over the course of the year.

The latter figure was, however, the focus of further reflection. Bigoni stressed that whilst the volume of documentaries is now considerably higher, it’s also heavily polarised. Only 48 titles - equivalent to 11.5% of documentaries released in 2025 - were screened in more than 50 cinemas, yet they still managed to generate over 90% of total box office takings for the documentary genre. The figures for event screenings are even more revealing, involving barely 8.8% of titles but accounting for over 37% of documentary takings, with a per-film average almost five times higher than for traditional film releases.

Michele Zanlari, commercial director at Tucker Film, Europictures and Officine Ubu, weighed in on this point, advising caution in interpreting those numbers. “Cinetel’s figures only tell half the story”, he observed, because they can’t convey the economic context of many event screenings: higher marketing investments, higher ticket prices, and, in some cases, “empty but full” compensation mechanisms  - whereby certain screenings are financially accounted for as if those cinemas were full even if attendance was low - which alter people’s perceptions of a film’s success. In other words, according to Zanlari, we can’t automatically assume that the success of event screenings is an indicator of the state of the wider documentary sector.

The real, enduring issue, as made clear in this discussion, is circulation. Bigoni reminded attendees that 88.5% of documentaries are screened in fewer than 50 cinemas and that, often, the smallest titles don’t even gain real access to the market. Hence the idea for a new platform which is being promoted by the festival and introduced by Fortunato, to connect cinema operators, filmmakers and independent distributors by centralising film profiles, promotional material, technical data, screening requests, financial negotiations and administrative management. Still at the beta phase at the time of its presentation, the platform was swiftly shown to be lightweight in terms of its infrastructure, with plans in place to test it over the course of a year before a potential full launch in 2027.

Rather than the platform’s technical functionality, discussions focused on the issues a tool of this kind might resolve. Marte Puck Bernardi, who heads up the Teatro Galliera Cinema in Bologna, clearly explained how unmanageable the stream of proposed films has become for independent cinemas. “I want to see synopses that I can publish on a website, a trailer, a screener”, she stressed, adding that often even basic comms material is missing. For Bernardi, an aggregator of this kind would first and foremost be a “time saving, failsafe tool”.

Alongside practical matters, a wider debate emerged on the system model. Zanlari spoke out against the risks of continuing to reason according to a “zero-sum” logic, where the various cinema operators find themselves fighting over a fixed pool of viewers rather than working to broaden that pool. He suggested a form of “relational intelligence” to transform the platform from a database into a space for exchanging information, recommendations and feedback between cinema operators, distributors and filmmakers.

Filmmaker and 100Autori representative Alessandro Rossi shared similar thoughts, emphasising that nowadays, the focus isn’t just on “working as a system” but building “horizonal relationships between all those working towards similar ideas around film”. Rossi also insisted that a technological tool could prove critical, especially for younger people and for less structured entities who are having to contend with an increasingly fragile production context.

In the brief Q&A session at the close of the round table, another two useful points emerged on the industry side: the need to implement filters and checks in order to avoid abuses or forms of artificial self-legitimacy within the catalogue, and to incorporate a nigh-on educational function within the platform, capable of guiding film directors and small producers in the correct preparation of materials, the classification of works and understanding the indispensable steps to ensuring their films are screened in cinemas.

In short, the discussion clearly demonstrated that the Italian documentary sector now boasts fairly solid and sometimes surprising results, but that aggregate growth isn’t enough. The problem isn’t only about how many documentaries are being released, it’s about which works enjoy proper circulation, how they achieve this, and as a result of which connections.