SSFF Lands in Vicopisano: Cinema, Surf Culture, and Authorial Vision with Luca Merli

In Vicopisano, the 18th and 19th of July, in the heart of Tuscany, the Skate Surf Film Festival has chosen a setting that perfectly reflects its spirit: a medieval hill town among the most charming in the region, capable of hosting a cultural project that brings together independent cinema, surf culture, skateboarding, and music in an authentic, locally rooted context. The Tuscan stop of the 10th Year Edition is not just another date on the calendar, but a meeting point of languages, communities, and places that share the same idea of culture as something lived, participatory, and contemporary.

After the success of the opening Milan event, the festival arrives in Vicopisano reaffirming its itinerant vocation, building each time a precise dialogue with the territory that hosts it. In this case, the connection with the local scene is strengthened by the presence of Dr Ank Surfboards, a historic name in Tuscan surf culture, which hosts and supports the project together with the Municipality of Vicopisano and the Circolo ARCI L’Ortaccio. The choice of location is no coincidence: the village, the municipal theater, and the club spaces all become part of the experience, turning the festival into an immersive story shaped by architecture, landscape, and the culture of the sea.

The festival program fully reflects SSFF’s transversal identity. Screenings, talks, music, and social moments unfold over two days centered on cinema as a tool for storytelling and sharing. The film selection moves across surf, travel, craftsmanship, sustainability, and coastal communities, pairing documentaries and international works with an environment where the audience is not merely watching, but actively taking part in a living culture. Alongside the screenings, there are DJ sets, live moments, and a strong skate component, including a stop of the Brooklyn Skateboarding Tour, which further reinforces the festival’s urban and contemporary soul.

What makes SSFF immediately recognizable is its ability to bring together seemingly distant worlds: surf as a gesture, the board as a cultural object, cinema as a language, and music as a unifying force. Over ten years, the festival has become a platform capable of involving filmmakers, photographers, artists, shapers, surfers, and skaters from around the world, building an imaginary that goes beyond the event itself and becomes a real creative community. In this sense, Vicopisano is a particularly meaningful stop because it brings the festival back to its deepest roots: the relationship between sea, people, and territory.

At the center of it all is Luca Merli, the festival’s founder and creator, as well as the driving force behind Onde Nostre, a project born to tell and preserve the memory of Italian surf through cinema and visual research. Merli is a key figure in Italian surf and documentary culture: filmmaker, photographer, producer, and creative director, he has built a career marked by consistency, quality, and narrative sensitivity. His vision does not simply celebrate a subculture; it interprets it as a way to read landscapes, identities, and social change.

With SSFF, Merli has shaped a festival that does more than program films: it creates contexts. Each stop is conceived as a complete cultural experience, where the film selection dialogues with the place, the audience, and a network of realities that share values of authenticity, research, and independence. It is this ability to connect content and context, aesthetics and relationships, that makes the project especially solid and distinctive within the European scene.

In Vicopisano, then, the festival brings not only a lineup of films, but a vision. The Dr Ank location, the role of the Tuscan village, and the presence of an attentive and engaged community all help strengthen the meaning of an event that speaks the language of the sea, yet does so through cinema, music, and the culture of making. And in this story, Luca Merli remains the point of origin: the filmmaker behind a project that has turned a passion into a festival with a strong identity, contemporary relevance, and lasting impact.

Filippo Ceragioli

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