We invite you on a tour of Europe through three community-based initiatives united by their commitment to people with intellectual disabilities. Our cover package guides you from Cambridge to Lamezia Terme by way of Lviv. What binds them together? What do they propose that unsettles the world so radically? Can they offer us a glimpse of a reality that finally steps away from fashionable dystopias—or from the anxious scenarios where artificial intelligence wipes humanity from the earth?
A glimpse. That word came to a user at a Rome mental health center fourteen years ago, when he imagined it as a way to describe a collective effort: he and his group searching for the right films to tell (and retell) the lived experience of mental illness. They began by sharing reactions to films in a therapeutic group that uses multifamily psychoanalytic methods. This approach—bringing together multiple patients, their relatives, and staff—reveals profound dynamics of "healthy virtuality" as families recognize themselves in others. But that wasn't enough. They needed a wider community to engage with them. And so Lo Spiraglio Film Festival for Mental Health was born, which we explore here through two films from its most recent edition—one touching on the same pain Galeotti describes in her interview with Alicia Lopes Araújo: the rupture of Cape Verdean women from their native soil.
Letting ourselves be touched by experiences like these can help ground us, bring us back to solid earth—the place where we have to walk. That "Galilee of everyday life," as Don Marco Bove calls it in his recent book (which we review here), is where each of us is called to live. It reminds us always that wherever we are, He is there too.