In 2002, the Italian Cooperation Office in Mozambique, under the direction of Fabio Melloni, a founding member and current president of Imagine esg, launched a cinema caravan that travelled to rural areas of the country to promote an awareness campaign on safe procedure for cholera prevention.
The travelling cinema caravan, CinemArena, was able to involve local civil society organizations, national and local public authorities, traditional leaders, and communities, with an immediate impact and extraordinary participation of the population. CinemArena was therefore able to reach, inform and motivate the most remote communities with little or no access to information and services, attracting tens of thousands of people while promoting a cultural operation based on international cinema and local productions.
The locations thus reached usually had very limited exchanges with the country's major cities. The power and simplicity of the images attracted the attention of everyone, regardless of age, gender, language, and religion. The travelling cinema involved illiterate people and those who had never attended a film or television show. As Mia Couto, one of Mozambique's leading novelists, described the CinemArena experience, "at a certain point, all people, adults and the aged go back to being children again. There wasn’t just a show, but the gathering itself became the show. The savannah was now the big theatre. The screen was now mixed up with the sky. Some stars came down from the sky to the screen."
This operational model was replicated with the same success in Lebanon, Ethiopia and again in Mozambique, all countries where the president of the Foundation headed the Italian Cooperation Office. The format was subsequently replicated throughout the world, from Asia to Africa to Latin America. Management of operations related to CinemArena's multiple campaigns was entrusted to other founding partners of Imagine esg, Fabrizio Falcone and Federica Anfosso, who also sit on the Board of Directors, and to the Foundation's current executive director, Andrea Borgarello.
Numerous topics were covered as part of the CinemArena: the fight against HIV/AIDS, the prevention of transmissible diseases, women's rights and the fight against genital mutilation, raising awareness about unexploded ordnance in Lebanon immediately after the 2006 conflict with Israel, risks of irregular migration in West African countries, civil registration, participation in democratic life, and numerous other topics that are fundamental to the social and institutional growth of countries.
In December 2022, the people who had taken part in the creation and development of CinemArena for years, as well as those who had journalistically documented its action, Paolo Fratter and Monica Peruzzi of SkyNews, brought Imagine esg Foundation into existence. The purpose of the Foundation is to provide the actors committed to promote development and social integration with an extraordinary tool for engaging and interacting with communities and target groups.
