I Love Lucca Comics & Games lit up the 20th Rome Film Festival, where it had its official world premiere last night in the FreeStyle Arts section.
Announced in a press release, the eagerly awaited film will screen in Italian cinemas for three days — Nov. 10, 11 and 12, 2025 — distributed by I Wonder Pictures in collaboration with the Unipol Biografilm Collection. The film’s director, Manlio Castagna, described it as a celebration of individuality, saying, “They put on masks to show their true selves.”
Castagna walked the red carpet at the Auditorium Parco della Musica and later at the striking MAXXI Museum, alongside Andrea Romeo, producer and editorial director of I Wonder Pictures; Emanuele Vietina, director of Lucca Comics & Games; and executive producer Giulia Moretti.
“This is a movie about communities,” Castagna said in an interview with Variety. “It’s a place where bridges are more important than walls. It’s important to show how gratitude, for example, is a sort of a glue between normal people, normal in quotation marks, normal people and the community and the artist, the guest.”
I LOVE LUCCA COMICS & GAMES shines a light on one of the world’s biggest pop-culture events as not just one of scale, but one that acts as a transformative experience and a meeting point that brings thousands together to share an explosion of joy and creativity—a place that generates happiness.
The film features interviews with several notable artists, including Gabriele Mainetti; best-selling writers R.L. Stine and Licia Troisi; rapper Frankie hi-nrg mc; and comic artists Pera Toons, Sio, Fumettibrutti, Yoshitaka Amano and Roberto Recchioni. It is a film that explores the human experience of an event that generates happiness and forges lasting connections.
Each personal and intimate story becomes part of a universal journey—one line in an arabesque that draws a world of hospitality and kindness, a community united by shared passions and the joy of being together.
