Who are we

Il Varco is an Italian creative hub based in Rome, founded by Andrea Gatopoulos and Marco Crispano in 2015. Our goal is to nurture, empower and produce quality cultural and artistic non-consumable content ranging from cinema to literature, photography and painting. We believe in a productive environment based on uniqueness, spiritual growth, sincerity and humbleness, and we look to produce works of human beings that can embody this kind of philosophy in their works.

Since 2015 we have produced 16 short films and 3 feature films selected in more than 150 festivals around the world, including Oscar ® Qualifying and EFA ® Qualifying events. We have organized and incubated more than 65 film screenings in 3 countries, showing films from 75 countries to thousands of spectators, including works from Palm D’Or winners, Oscar nominated directors, EFA winners, connecting film directors from all over the world. We have been included in the Top 100 Best Reviewed Film Festival in the world with Il Varco International Short Film Festival, and we incubate Rome Prisma Film Awards, the #1 most reviewed film festival in Europe among more than 3500 events.

We strive to support and promote film culture and film literacy through Short Days, an essay film screening which features a different artistic director every month, and Nuovo Cinema Abruzzese, a film screening of local film directors from our home land.

We are active in the photographic panorama with Passepartout Photo Prize, an international contest based in Rome born to promote and widen the exposure of international photographers, collaborating with esteemed professionals like Richard Tuschman and World Press Photo Awards winner Laura Pannack.

Since 2019, we promoted painters and paintings through Prisma Art Prize, a seasonal event based in Rome that published more than 600 painters from dozens of countries in the world in our online galleries.

Our film production process is further empowered by our distribution company Gargantua Film, featured in the 5 international distributors to meet the buyers at 2020 Turin Short Film Market, and FedraHub, an independent post-production facility which specializes in video post production and cinema delivery.

We are planning to further develop our company into the on demand video market and into a digital platform for film distribution.