The camera reaches the school. Children's cinema by Emilio Sidoti

The small gauge film format entered schools towards the end of the 1960s on the initiative of enlightened teachers who realised its importance as a didactic tool and, above all, capable of stimulating the creativity of children and young people. These were the first pioneering attempts, astonishing in their results. That of cinema at school is a little-known story but one in which Italy was in the vanguard, thanks also to the experience of teachers such as Emilio Sidoti. Sidoti is in fact a true pioneer and experimenter of cinema at school who, through his story, bears witness to his experience in contact with children, his memories and the value of cinema as a 'game'.Through his story, the over ninety year old Sidoti tells us today that the revolution was the passage from cinema with children, in which the teacher is in fact the director and the intent is didactic, of participation and of making children relive history by staging episodes from the past, to children's cinema, which instead sees children as the absolute protagonists from the subject to the film, free to express their creativity in unexpected forms. Sidoti's approach created a scandal and was repeatedly opposed, but also widely supported by artists and intellectuals.