Film
Waterways - Le Vie dell'Acqua
Le Vie dell’Acqua (Waterways) is a feature-length fiction film written and directed by Fabio Masi and produced by Growing Production srl, developed within the ERC-funded project MICOLL – hosted by the University of Padua and led by Professor Stefania Gialdroni.
Conceived as an innovative tool for public engagement, the film represents a distinctive blend of historical research and contemporary storytelling. Set between Padua and Venice, it follows a group of high school students whose school assignment gradually turns into a personal and collective journey. Through classroom lessons, theatre rehearsals and encounters with historical places, the film weaves together education, emotion and reflection on identity, offering an experience that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging.
Waterways was premiered at the prestigious 82nd Venice International Film Festival on September 5th 2025, garnering significant attention. It has since been screened at universities, schools and public events across Italy, and received coverage on major national television networks and newspapers: Sky; Rai; Il Mattino.
To explore these themes in greater depth, read the interview conducted by Professor Antonio Cappuccio with Stefania Gialdroni for LawArt – Journal of Law, Art and History.
Rather than adopting a traditional documentary format, Le Vie dell’Acqua uses the language of narrative cinema to address complex research themes in an accessible way. It explores issues that resonate strongly with younger generations, such as the relationship between young people and technology, the conscious use of social media as educational tools, friendship, first love, family conflict, and the search for one’s place in a hyper-connected world. At the same time, these contemporary experiences are connected to the project’s core research topics: mobility, trust, commercial exchange, and the circulation of legal concepts, people and knowledge across Europe in the late medieval and early modern period.
The film is the cornerstone of a three-layer research communication format developed within MICOLL, designed to guide different audiences through progressive levels of engagement:
- Narrative access – The feature film acts as an entry point, capturing attention through storytelling and emotional involvement, and making historical research meaningful for a broad, non-academic public, especially young audiences.
- Deepening and mediation – Short excerpts from interviews with international experts are embedded in the film, while the full interviews are freely available online, allowing viewers to explore the scientific background at their own pace. The interviews are available here: @micollerc6082.
- Scientific consolidation – Open-access scholarly publications and digital resources hosted on the MICOLL website provide a third level of engagement, offering reliable references and opportunities for further study.
Through this layered approach, Le Vie dell’Acqua goes beyond dissemination to foster genuine dialogue between research and society. It demonstrates how ERC-funded frontier research can be communicated in a rigorous yet inclusive way, transforming disciplinary complexity into an opportunity for curiosity, reflection and shared understanding.
A carousel of projections and achieved ambitions:
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