Umbria Jazz Feast

Umbria Jazz Feast (2026) is an experimental documentary about the multisensory and multicultural intersections that emerged during the 2025 edition of the Umbria Jazz Festival, the largest jazz festival in Europe, held in Perugia, a medieval town in central Italy. Departing from earlier histories and documentaries about the festival—which tend to focus on stage performances in enclosed venues for seated, paying audiences—the film presents an alternative narrative by foregrounding the festival’s street dimension.
It focuses not only on musicians but also on the people who attend the events while standing or dancing, revealing a more participatory and inclusive mode of sharing music, closer to Afrocentric traditions. While shooting the film, we used handheld cameras and microphones placed within the crowds to capture the audience’s listening perspective, as well as the voices and ambient sounds of an urban ecosystem in which cicadas, birds, and traffic blend together. The city itself functions as a musical instrument, a resonant chamber, and a stage where the distance between musicians and audience blurs or disappears.
The film includes not only official events taking place in the city’s public and free open spaces but also the presence of buskers and musicians—both local and international—including griots from Mali (West Africa) performing in restaurants and on the streets. Edited according to the astronomical cycle of light—from night to sunrise and back to night—the film reflects the festival’s near-continuous twenty-hour daily rhythm. The film also documents the cross-fertilization of global African-rooted American music and Italian identity and culture as experienced by people of different backgrounds and from different countries, inviting a reflection on trans-cultural processes of global cross-fertilization.