In its third year this festival promotes, with the support of Academia Barilla, stories and traditions that never age: cuisine as a metaphor of Italian life. Academia Barilla awards two winners in the "Stories of the Kitchen" categoryon the main square of Brescello, June 10, 2005

The third year of the festival "Small Cinematic World" held in Brescello has been enriched by a special section "Stories of the Kitchen" - an initiative supported by Academia Barilla whose mission is to promote and to protect the most representative values of the Italian gastronomic tradition and cuisine. These values have been immortalized in images that display the extent to which cuisine is a metaphor of life.

The two winners of the Academia Barilla Award (which consists of a cash prize, a trophy and a basket of Academia Barilla products) were:
1. Piero Cannizzaro for feature "Storie di dolci"
2. Silvia Bigliardi for short film "La dote"

"Storie di dolci" tells the story of a victory over poverty that takes place in the 1940s and the 1950s in a small Sicilian town of Erice located in the province of Trapani. Today the town is renown as the city of science but until a few years ago its main claim to fame has been its thousand-year-old tradition of making exquisite desserts that blend Mediterranean, Arab and North African flavors and aromas. These mesmerizing desserts have been created behind the gates of this medieval town.

Maria Grammatico - today in her seventies - grew up in a convent in Erice. During these years she had been "stealing" recipes and secrets of making incomparable pastries that the nuns had safeguarded for centuries. After leaving the convent where she had passed her childhood and adolescent years, Maria opens her own pastry shop where she employs the recipes stocked away in the drawers of her memory: methods and ingredients that were in danger of disappearing forever.

"La dote", which in fact is the bundle of carrots, parsley, onions, garlic and celery necessary for making a broth - the corner stone of countless dishes, is the protagonist in a world from which men, until few years ago, have been excluded. A girl that spies on this female world, a grandmother that speaks in allusions and metaphors. She, a woman living in a society that is changing and evolving, discovers that the message to pass onto the next generation, regardless of the changing times, is the same as the one that had been passed onto her by her grandmother: "The good is like the salt, like the senses: never too little or too much. In food. In tears. In the sea."

Two Italian stories that bring back the values of our community life, immortalizing them and passing them onto the future generations of Italians: the food, the labor of cooking, an event that is repeated daily, although today, unfortunately, many of these rituals, traditions and insights have been disappearing due to changing lifestyle.

Academia Barilla has decided to recognize two works of art that are full of insight and time-tested knowledge, and at the same time celebrate "simple cuisine." It conveys a poetry of life that merits to be preserved as one of our best traditions and as a means to spread, through cinematic images, the values and the culture of Italian gastronomy around the world.