Movimento fermo: reframing mountain contemporary imagineries through filmic geography

The article examines a cinematic geographic approach to understanding the phenomenon of new residents who choose to live in marginal locations in the Italian mountains in search of a more satisfying lifestyle and with the intention of revitalizing depopulated mountain settlements. This phenomenon challenges the modernist notion of the mountain as a static, abandoned space relegated to the periphery of urban life.Through a comprehensive presentation of the stages of research, from pre-production to final dissemination, we show how the ‘geo-cinematographic’ approach of the geographical film Movimento fermo (‘Still movement’) could be used as a method for spatially exploring the complex relationships between urban and rural, local and global, material and immaterial dimensions of the protagonists’ daily lives. With the aim of expanding the boundaries of academic research, geographic film is proposed as an attempt to inscribe movement in contemporary mountain imaginaries, using the growing pervasiveness of the film format to deconstruct old and new rhetorics about marginal mountains and their inhabitants.