Golden Spike Award to Pomilio Blumm's documentary on Sebastião Salgado

franco pomilio cannes golden spike award

Franco Pomilio speech at Cannes Film Festival

Premiered at the Cannes film festival "A Social Design Story" focusing on the great Brazilian photographer

The documentary "A Social Design Story - Humanscapes" produced by Pomilio Blumm won the Golden Spike Award at the Social World Film Festival. The award-winning film focuses on Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, one of the world's most important photographers, in a project with a strong social impact dedicated to water, landscape and the ancestral humanity of the Amazon.

The Golden Spike Award was presented to Franco Pomilio, president of Pomilio Blumm at the Italian Pavilion of the Cannes film festival. «Sebastião Salgado is considered at the same time a photographer, an anthropologist, a sociologist and certainly an artist. His research is based on the relationship between human beings and their habitat, following them in their migrations, their mutations and their constant search for a future. His approach is much more than an artistic view of the landscape, it is absolutely humanistic. This makes his 'gaze' a powerful tool for understanding the changing society and offers a privileged angle from which to observe the disruptive processes shaping our future as a community», Franco Pomilio explained during the ceremony.

Indeed, the new challenge for global institutions is to promote sustainable and integrated urban living. Sustainable development is an urgent need in the era of the global energy crisis and climate change, and the documentary revolves around these themes, involving, in addition to Salgado, other exceptional photographers Jimmy Nelson, whose project 'Before They Pass Away', on the most fascinating tribal communities still existing, was also broadcast by National Geographic. In addition to him, Lynn Saville, a New Yorker-acclaimed photo artist specialising in portraying cities and rural environments, and Gianni Berengo Gardin, who has documented numerous social changes over the decades, creating a black-and-white world of faces, gestures, landscapes and architecture, captured in their purest, timeless authenticity.

«Humanscapes is the project, started in 2021, that has seen us involved, through the eyes of Sebastião Salgado, in investigating the power of images, in the "synthetic" and almost immersive narrative of their message. Our job is to speak to the people, to the extended communities of citizens and to improve their dialogue with the institutions», added Franco Pomilio.

The Social World Film Festival, which will take place from 2 to 9 July, is divided into 12 sections and hosts films from 42 nations with a special 'Market' section hosting 170 films.