FIL Fest – Festival della Felicità Interna Lorda
9 November 2019 - Ilenia Nicolosi

Capofila: Impact HUB Siracusa

FIL Fest is a festival of Philosophy, Anthropology, Economics and Culture that is proposed as a moment of aggregation and participatory reflection how we can seize the opportunities for happiness to which the state of crisis of our times is pushing us. Through meetings, debates, events, festivals and performances, we develop choral reflections, to trace together individual and collective paths where there is room for what we really like doing and being and … not just having.

2013 Edition – Fair and Sustainable Wellness
The answers to get out of the crisis are imposing a profound revision of the assumptions according to which the economy and above all finance are the only areas on which it is necessary to intervene. Italy, strengthened by a tradition of economic theory that has given value to the question of happiness in its collective dimensions, marks its presence in the international debate. With the work of the CNEL and Istat, which proposed an indicator of Fair and Sustainable Wellbeing (BES), our country was among the first to acknowledge the need to define new dimensions of well-being that do not take into account only the number of goods produced and consumed but of multiple dimensions linked to the quality of life and relationships, access to services, the quality of the environment and that of places and work conditions. More and more well-being calls into question some idea of ​​happiness: against the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) it makes its way and advances the need to reason about Gross Domestic Happiness (FIL* in Italian).

Edition 2014 – Happy cities
The second edition of the FILfest was dedicated to the theme of Happy Cities. The intent is to reconnect us to the all-Italian tradition of public happiness, which has a cultural matrix that is alien to both utilitarianism and declinations in the hedonistic sense of happiness. The experiences of medieval city-states – for example – have marked a fundamental passage in which a way of understanding markets, civil society, work and participation has taken shape. Economic thought in that phase considered cities as places of civilization, where they pursue those civil virtues that allow the construction of human environments in which to be happy together. Starting from this heritage, we wanted to return to reflect on our urban development model, to understand how to enhance a relational heritage capable of determining the well-being of people, in workplaces as well as in social and family life.

2016 Edition – Lands
The FILFest 2016 was a time to reflect on the ways to inhabit the earth and respond to global challenges. Earth is certainly the planet, but at the same time it is the ground on which we rest our feet, it is the territory where our house rises, the land we cultivate, the places from which we start and to which we arrive, our “cultural homelands”, the bonds that we build in the world and make us feel happy because they form the sense of us. For this reason, we like to decline the word in the plural, TERRE (Lands), a way to remember the continuous remodeling of cultures, arts, religions, economic solutions, social bonds, family networks that contribute to making our planet, as well as territories, places, the houses in which we live really livable in the long run.

Edition 2018 – Time
In 2018 the FIL Fest dealt with Time. All-round time. Fixed time, variable time. Time and Money. While the GDP continues to deal with the second (Money), the FIL wants to take care of the first (Time). FIL once again as an alternative possibility to GDP.
Gross Domestic Happiness and Time: Time as a value and as a resource for living happily. Time as a measure of living together and as a precious (and insufficient) resource, as well as a measure of the degree of happiness of a community.