-

THURSDAY, 28 MAY, 2026
6PM
BLACK BOX, PALAZZO DIEDO

-

Duration: 60m
The film is screened in Italian with Italian subtitles. Free admission until capacity is reached.
The event will be followed by a conversation between the director and writer Enrico Palandri.

-

Poetry Boy is a documentary portrait of Nanni Balestrini — poet, novelist, visual artist, and one of the most influential political voices in postwar Italian culture. When Balestrini died in 2019, director Nina di Majo set out across Italy to revisit the people, places, and memories that defined him, piecing together a portrait as layered and restless as the man himself.

At the heart of the film is the radical force of Balestrini's work: the way his writing challenged form, his thinking challenged power, and his life bridged the distance between art and politics. Drawing a line from Gruppo 63 to the upheavals of 1969 and 1977, di Majo traces how Balestrini helped shape the artistic, literary, and political landscape of modern Italy.

The film is built from archival video, recordings, photographs, and documents that bring Balestrini's own voice back to life. These are woven together with interviews filmed across Rome, Milan, Paris, and Berlin, where friends, fellow travelers, scholars, and artists speak to what it meant to know him and to think alongside him. Contributors include Andrea Barzini, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Angelo Guglielmi, Peppe Morra, Gigi Roggero, and Girolamo De Simone.

–

Nina Di Majo is an award-winning director, screenwriter, and educator whose short film Spalle al muro earned her both a David di Donatello and a Sacher d'Oro. Her features have screened at some of the world's leading festivals — Autunno at Venice, L'Inverno at Berlin — and she has worked with major Italian actresses including Valeria Golino and Margherita Buy, with Matrimoni e altri disastri bringing her further popular success.

Alongside her fiction work, Di Majo has built a distinctive body of documentary films exploring the lives and practices of major artists, among them Peter Greenaway and Anish Kapoor. Nanni Balestrini: Poetry Boy (2025) is her most recent work in this vein. She also teaches screenwriting and audiovisual production at NABA, IULM, and UNISA.