Proximity Cinema and Creative Tourism

In Italy there exists a vast output of amateur film projects and/or projects embedded within school programmes or so-called "off" circuits. These are productions that are frequently low-budget, just as frequently involve people from the local area, and are not rarely the fruit of specific "residencies."

The short films that result from these processes should, in most cases, not be treated as simple products (outputs), but rather as a joint outcome of product and process. Put differently, unlike other audiovisual products, the "working process" in these productions represents a central dimension. A centrality that is not infrequently expressed within the resulting short film itself, in which the relational component enters into the stylistic and thematic vocabulary of the work.

This "outside-inside" connection has generated a substantial body of theory — not only in film studies, but also rooted in psychology and sociology: elements such as the perception of a place's "potential," or the recognition of an identity-based bond with one's own territory, are themes that figure significantly in both academic and non-academic reflections focused on this type of production.

Less frequent, though not absent, are considerations of a more strictly economic nature — and in particular the connections between this type of production and tourist footfall.

Leonardi and Dubini, for example, in their Arts-based methods for place-based innovation and affective activation in rural areas: a film residency in Cassine, published in June 2026 in the Journal of Place Management and Development, explore — through qualitative and inductive research techniques — the effects of a film residency in a rural municipality, among which emerge reflections linked to the tourist dimension that this model can tendentially generate.

The relationship between non-mainstream audiovisual production and tourism effects on territories is an extremely interesting subject, because unlike what happens, for example, in analyses of the relationship between mainstream production and territory — a relationship typically condensed into arrival figures — the bonds created through the making of a short film, more or less professional, one that involves direct community participation, engage more "intimate" aspects of people, thereby creating a connection that, even from a purely economic standpoint, represents a far more solid value and, above all, one that tends to grow over time.

This insight becomes particularly relevant when the themes explored by Leonardi and Dubini are placed in relation to the broader domain of so-called "creative tourism" — that form of tourism in which participants are called upon to take an active, hands-on role in the creation of cultural and creative products.

More specifically, one of the "foundational" definitions of creative tourism is the one proposed by Richards & Raymond in 2000, later extended by Richards & Wilson in 2006, which defines the experience as "a form of tourism which offers visitors the opportunity to develop their creative potential through active participation in courses and learning experiences, which are characteristic of the holiday destination where they are taken."

Definitions aside, tourism products of this kind are growing ever more numerous and widespread: it is therefore quite natural to come across dozens of American tourists busy on a pizza-making course in Naples, or tourists actively participating in the creation of an object having rapidly picked up the rudiments of artisan techniques.

Observations that, language aside, carry an evident empirical dimension — one that constitutes a tendential development opportunity, both in territorial and in tourism terms.

Taken together, these reflections reveal a connection that, to simplify as much as possible, suggests that cultural participation in creative activities generates positive effects both among residents and among tourists.

A connection that, much like the creative tourism Richards intuited more than a quarter of a century ago, is simply waiting to be operationally transposed into the form of tourist goods and services.

The initial reference to local audiovisual productions acquires, in light of this connection, added significance when placed within proximity contexts. The design of a short film that, beyond providing a "film residency" for the director, also envisages the involvement of actors drawn from areas adjacent to those planned for the actual shoot can therefore enable the production of two distinct effects: on the one hand, the activation of those psychological, sociological and economic elements that Leonardi and Dubini were able to highlight in their article and which, to use economic terminology, lead citizens to recognise the possibility of expanding the "productive possibilities frontier of the territory"; on the other, the activation of regional tourism processes, grounded in the greater solidity of the bond that forms with a territory when one participates in a cultural and creative production — bonds that can therefore trigger phenomena of repeat visitation and the subsequent extension of what we once fondly called territorial awareness.

Clearly, a mechanism of this kind needs to be implemented in a programmatic fashion, failing which one ends up with experiments that, however positive, do not allow for the reaching of those "threshold values" which, as in all social mechanisms, are the prelude to exponential growth.

Once such values are reached, however, this practice could represent a distinctive factor not only at the territorial level but also on the international stage — conferring upon territories that perhaps lack artisan traditions or local culinary productions the possibility of claiming a contemporary "productive specificity," capable of drawing the attention of tourists who might decide to visit that territory for the sole purpose of participating in the making of a short film.

Despite the presence of a historicised cultural heritage that always nudges us towards valorising our past (local food products, traditional crafts, and so on), we must not overlook the fact that among the enormous mass of activities that characterise our country there are also contemporary experiences and productions — and that valorising them could significantly enrich not only our tourism offering, but the offering directed at all citizens.