Francesca Svampa is an Italian-born filmmaker and visual artist based in Barcelona. Her practice revolves around handmade analogue cinema, tactile processes, found and personal archives, and first-person cinema, practices where process itself becomes a form of inquiry. She pays close attention to the means of production and their implications, and pursues an autonomous, independent way of making films.

With this impulse, in her hometown Fermo, Italy, she founded Luma Experimental Film Lab and co-founded Adriatikino, a short film festival dedicated to analogue cinema, to developing a different way of seeing and sharing it with a community. In Barcelona, she is a member of Crater Lab.

She holds a Master’s degree in Essay Film from EICTV (Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión) in Cuba. Her background in Economics, Theatre, and Music preceded cinema and never really left it.

Curiosity has kept her moving. She has lived in several countries, making images and leading workshops wherever she’s been, in contexts ranging from indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico to contemporary dance festivals in Europe and Latin America.

Along this path her practice has moved through different genres, each folding into the next: non-fiction cinema, videodance, video art, experimental film. These are not stages left behind but layers that keep feeding into each other in the way she works today.

Her films are intimate, handmade, and close to the body. They deal with memory, gaze, and perception.

They have screened at festivals including Athens International Film + Video Festival, DOC Buenos Aires, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Bellaria Film Festival, Alcances, WOEFF, and Catania Film Festival, where she received the Critics’ Prize. Her work was also awarded a Special Mention at MATIFF, Matera International Film Festival.