Four years after her last album, Elisa gets a medium-length film at the Rome Film Festa

The Festa del Cinema di Roma opens its 21st edition on October 13, 2026, and on October 23 it will show Kintsugi… e sono la mia opera, a medium-length film that Ludovico Boccianti shot while the Italian singer-songwriter Elisa was making her new album. Elisa will meet the festival's audience at the premiere. The album, also called Kintsugi, comes out on November 27.

A film born inside the recording

The festival added the film to its programme on October 1, 2026, together with two other titles, according to the news agency ANSA. It sits in the Special Screenings section. The festival's own description calls it a story of pain, transformation and rebirth, born during the work on Elisa's new album, in which images, music, dance and words carry the emotions tied to the songs. Elisa herself gave the film its frame. In the statement quoted by ANSA and by Libero, she says she went through a pain and turned it into a way of finding herself again, and into the courage to live the life she wants. Kintsugi, she adds, means moving on while carrying everything that hurt her. The cracks are where "è da lì che esce la mia luce", which is to say that her light comes out of them.

Boccianti is not new to her project. He also directed the official video of the single, released on September 11, 2026. According to Radio Italia, that video ends with Elisa falling to the ground, shattering and rebuilding herself, after a scene in which she watches an earlier version of herself on television, writes in a notebook and tears out pages.

So the film is the second image the project offers of the same idea.

The first lasted a few minutes and lived on radio and online channels. The second will be shown in a theatre, to a seated audience, with the singer in the city. That difference matters for attention: a clip is seen by whoever scrolls past it, while a festival ticket is bought by someone who has decided to sit for the whole story.

The other two titles added the same day sit beside it without sharing its subject. Faith is a drama by Paul Andrew Williams with Erin Doherty and James McAvoy. Ricordati ragazza is a documentary by the actress Claudia Gerini that follows a family across the century since Italian women first voted in 1946.

What Rome has scheduled around it

The festival runs until October 25 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, with other venues in the city. Its programme page gathers the music-related titles in one strand and places them day by day, so that a singer's film is read next to the portraits of other musicians rather than among the feature competitions.

The strand begins on Thursday, October 15, at 6:30 p.m. in the Sala Sinopoli with Je so' pazzo, Nicola Prosatore's portrait of Pino Daniele, the Neapolitan musician who revolutionised Italian music by blending blues, jazz and the Neapolitan tradition, and whose story runs from a childhood marked by abandonment to the concert of 1981 before two hundred thousand people. On October 19 comes a documentary on Mano Negra, the band led by Manu Chao. On October 21 the MAXXI museum shows Non importa dove, a film about Morgan, whom the festival describes as an artist gradually shut out of the music and television scene that once lionised him and made him a media personality. On October 22 the singer MACE appears in a film about his return to the Forum in Milan.

Elisa's screening is on Friday, October 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the Teatro Olimpico ACEA. The festival's text calls her one of the most talented voices in the history of Italian music. It gives the time and place of the screening but not of the meeting with the public.

The festival opens with The Noise of New Things, an Italian comedy drama by Paolo Genovese, and the host of the opening night, the DJ and writer Ema Stokholma, is a musician herself. Javier Bardem and Tessa Ross are honoured with lifetime achievement awards, so the programme around Elisa is crowded with names from outside her field.

The inauguration gives the music strand a first official moment. Marco Bellocchio is due to hand the first Banca Ifis Music Award to the composer Nicola Piovani, who won an Oscar for the score of La vita è bella.

Four years, a single, a calendar

The release plan is easy to read from the dates. Elisa's previous album, Ritorno al futuro / Back to the Future, came out more than four years before the single. The single Kintsugi arrived on Friday, September 11, 2026, written by Elisa and produced by Dardust, the stage name of Dario Faini. The album follows on November 27 on Island Records and Universal Music Italy. The record was open to pre-save on digital platforms and to pre-order in physical formats by the time of LaPresse's report of September 9, 2026. Radio Italia lists vinyl, numbered and signed vinyl, CD and numbered and signed CD. LaPresse adds that the numbered, autographed vinyl is a Shop Universal exclusive, so the most collectable copy is sold through the label's own store.

The film comes between the two releases, on October 23, five weeks before the album.

Then there is 2027. Elisa began her career in 1997, and in September 2027 she will mark thirty years of it with a concert called Soundtrack '97-'27 at the RCF Arena in Campovolo, near Reggio Emilia. KissKiss describes it as a day that starts in the morning and runs through music, art, creativity, memory, wellbeing and sustainability, not a single evening show. Radio Italia says Kintsugi will certainly be part of it.

None of this is unusual for a pop release in 2026, and the sources do not present it as anything else. What is notable is the order: a single, a video by one director, then a film by the same director, then the record, then a stadium-scale day. Each stage gives the same story another place to be seen and another way to buy it.

A metaphor under review

The story at the centre of that sequence is borrowed. The kintsugi technique mends broken ceramics with gold so that the cracks stay visible, and Elisa applies it to herself. The sources agree on the reading: wounds are not erased, they become part of the object.

Not everyone takes that image at face value. In its review of the September 11 releases, Libero Magazine calls kintsugi "la metafora più saccheggiata dai manuali di crescita personale", the metaphor most plundered by self-help manuals, second only to the phoenix. It adds that the risk of a motivational poster was around the corner, and that Elisa avoids it through form.

The reviewer describes an electro-pop arrangement of more than four minutes, alternating driving passages with slower ones until it becomes a romantic power ballad. The piece, it says, is itself a mended vase with the joins in plain sight. It also wonders whether so many changes of pace in one single are richness or indecision.

That is a critic's view of one single. The album has more to say, and little of it is public. The tracklist has not been released, and FilmSerieCanzoni notes that Universal Music Italy credits Dardust only for the single, not for the whole record, so how far his sound shapes the album is still unknown.

What the film adds, and what comes next

A film made during the recording gives the audience something a single cannot: time spent with the process. The festival's description speaks of the most intimate side of the singer, and Elisa's own statement presents the work as the outcome of a personal break. Whether the finished film delivers that depends on viewers, and the sources describe it only through the festival's and the artist's own words.

It also changes who the record is for. The people who book a festival seat to hear her speak are already attentive to her. The people who stream a single are, for the most part, not yet.

The dated steps are short. The film is shown at the Rome festival on October 23, the festival closes on October 25, the album comes out on November 27, and the Campovolo concert is set for September 2027.

For readers in the United States and the United Kingdom, Elisa's catalogue already holds albums and songs with English titles, such as Then Comes the Sun, Broken and No Hero, which KissKiss lists among her best-known works. Whether the new album or the film will be released outside Italy has not been announced.

Sources

• Rome Film Fest, The world of music at the Festa, Fondazione Cinema per Roma