Founded in 1959 by a group of scholars in the humanities, anthropology, sociology, ethnology and mass-media studies, the Festival dei Popoli Institute, a not-for-profit organization, has been active for sixty years in the promotion and study of social documentary cinema. The association works primarily to organize Italy’s leading International Documentary Film Festival, based in Florence. Simultaneously, the Festival dei Popoli continues to conserve and digitalize its own Archives (which contains over 25,000 titles, from video to film) and make strides in film training, organizing courses and workshops for documentary filmmakers. Over the course of activity, the Festival has dedicated retrospectives and tributes to the great masters of cinema: Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, Ken Loach, Nagisa Oshima, Lindsay Anderson, Aleksandr Sokurov, Jørgen Leth, Raymond Depardon, André Sauvage, Vincent Dieutre, Sergei Loznitsa. Among the Filmmakers in Focus of past editions: Claire Simon, Thomas Heise, Peter Mettler, Isaki Lacuesta, Andrés Di Tella, Marcel Łoziński e Paweł Łoziński, Jos de Putter, Mary Jimenez, Danielle Arbid, Kazuhiro Soda. Roberto Minervini.
