What: Screening of Le vie dell’acqua (“Waterways”)

Where: Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Pechino, Embassy of Italy (2, San Li Tun Dong Er Jie – 100600 Beijing)

When: 10 April 2026, 6:00 pm

There are moments, in every journey, when you suddenly realize how far you have truly come. For us, that moment arrived on April 10 in Beijing, at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (Embassy of Italy), on the occasion of the Giornata della Ricerca Italiana nel Mondo, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

The event  brought together an international audience for an afternoon dedicated to interdisciplinary research and dialogue between Europe and China. Following the opening remarks by the Deputy Director of the Institute, Elisa Messina, the program began with the screening of MICOLL’s movie Le vie dell’acqua, subtitled in both English and Chinese.

What followed exceeded our expectations. The audience was attentive, engaged, and deeply responsive: they laughed, they were moved, they followed the story with an intensity we had hardly dared to imagine. In that moment, it became clear that research, when it finds new languages, can truly travel across distances that seem immense.

The screening opened into a panel discussion that highlighted how contemporary research increasingly develops at the intersection of disciplines, bringing together history, law, economics, linguistics, and the arts to address the complexity of global phenomena. Moderated by prof. Alessandra Guidi, Scientific Attaché of the Italian Embassy, and by Raffaello Girotto, Legal Attaché, the panel gathered scholars and practitioners from different fields:  prof. Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci (Tsinghua University), specialist in complex systems and artificial intelligence, prof. Andrea Lorenzo Baldini (Peking University), scholar of aesthetics and creativity, and Yang Junjie (D’Andrea & Partners), expert in international commercial law and new technologies. Together, they offered complementary perspectives on the circulation of knowledge across cultures and disciplines.

The discussion was lively and continued with active participation from the audience, confirming the importance of such occasions for genuine exchange.

Filmmaker Fabio Masi and producers Benedetto Orestini and Corrado Tatangelo (Growing Production) also reflected on the value of projects that bring together academic research and audiovisual language. Looking ahead, they expressed their intention to develop new works along this line, a direction that in Beijing has already begun to take shape, also thanks to emerging collaborations with Chinese partners, around a new project on the Silk Road.

Gratitude, on an occasion like this, comes in many directions and is not easy to disentangle: to Ambassador Massimo Ambrosetti, to Alessandra Guidi, and to all the Embassy staff, for their trust and warm welcome; to the colleagues working on China from so many different perspectives, with whom we opened a rich and unexpected dialogue; to the University of Padua, which made this journey possible; to the Italian nation television Rai1, which covered the event; and to the audience, who gave it meaning.

This is, ultimately, our way of engaging beyond academia: sharing the themes, tools, and results of scientific research with a wider public, and seeking a language capable of connecting different worlds.

China has never felt so close.