VENICE — Director Berardo Carboni used his acceptance speech for a leading Venice Film Festival environmental prize to launch a petition asking European citizens to convene a constituent assembly, and he called on Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, to lend it her voice.
Carboni’s film, Greta e le favole vere (Greta and the true fables), won the Green Drop Award’s Special Prize on September 11, recognizing its “extraordinary capacity to transform ecological urgency into an accessible, poetic narrative,” according to the jury. The main Green Drop Award, a collateral prize of the 83rd Mostra (Venice’s film festival), went to Naza and L’estranea.
“This prize I dedicate to Greta Thunberg, whose voice has inspired an entire generation to confront the climate crisis,” Carboni said from the stage, “and today we want to do the same, taking that fable and making it come true.”
The petition, called the Stati Generali della Cura per una nuova Europa (States General of Care for a new Europe), invites citizens, scientists, activists, administrators, and institutions to help shape what Carboni calls a new Europe grounded in responsibility toward nature, people, and democracy. Organizers plan to deliver its signatures to Thunberg directly.
“Just as a young girl returns a bear to its habitat in the film, we can each do our part by signing,” the appeal reads. “Every small gesture, multiplied by thousands, can change the course of things.”
Screen to street
Carboni shared the stage with actors Donatella Finocchiaro, Sara Ciocca, Darko Peric, and Roberta Palumbo. Released in Italian cinemas on August 6, 2026, and distributed by Vision Distribution, the film follows a ten-year-old girl who, with her friend Sauro, frees a captive polar bear cub from poachers and sets out to return it to the Arctic.
The Green Drop Award was founded in 2012 by Green Cross Italia, an environmental nonprofit established by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and the City of Venice. Its trophy, a glass drop blown by Murano master glassmaker Simone Cenedese, this year holds gypsum from Poggio Torriana in Emilia-Romagna, sulfur from a former mine near Agrigento, and rock salt from Petralia Soprana, both in Sicily.
It is a small emblem for an appeal that now reaches beyond the Lido, the barrier island where the festival is held, carrying its petition from the awards stage toward the citizens it asks to help build a different Europe.
