Cortona On The Move 2025

Statement Paolo Woods

This year’s theme came to me while closing last year’s festival, on 4 November, the day before the US elections. The results of those elections made me realize that we live in an increasingly divided world where fault lines widen into open wounds and extremism feeds on polarization, where opposing sides do not speak but shout.

I wondered whether the festival should be a mirror of this world or should it try to direct our gaze towards something much more difficult to describe but much more important to achieve: reconciliation. The theme of the 15th edition of Cortona On The Move is “Come Together.” We will deal with wounds and healing. “Come Together” will explore why reconciliation is the only viable option, probing some of the many ways to achieve it—socially, politically and personally. Because indeed, reconciliation is not only with the other but foremost with oneself.

This 15th anniversary edition doesn’t seek to offer easy answers. Instead, it studies the spaces between ruptures and repair, between conflict and unity, exploring what it means to find common ground when the ground itself often feels like it’s falling away. We come to realize that reconciliation is not solely a compromise but requires us to embrace paradigm shifts and affirm new ways of being.

“Come Together” will be beautiful but also raw, messy and rough-edged. It is about the force and courage that keeps us trying to mend fractured relationships, whether it’s within families, across borders, or in the quiet, desperate attempt to reconcile with the self. By looking at stories where healing is possible, even if incomplete and imperfect, “Come Together” offers not just a view of the world as it is but as it might be.

As the author of the song that inspired the title of this edition wrote: “I know you, you know me. One thing I can tell you is you got to be free. Come together, right now.”