Room of Requirement

The Room of Requirement is a short film built from a private video archive recorded between 2013 and 2024. Through fragments of everyday life—friends in bedrooms, moments of boredom, confessions, laughter, and small performances in front of a camera—the film reflects on a generation born in the early 1990s, suspended between the analog world and the rise of digital self-representation. What began as a spontaneous gesture—filming oneself to pass the time or explore identity—now appears as a precursor to today’s culture of constant visibility. Moving between intimacy and performativity, the film turns personal footage into a collective portrait, questioning the moment when the camera stopped being a witness and became an extension of the self.

  • Ilaria Giaccio
    Director
  • Ilaria Giaccio
    Writer
  • Ilaria Giaccio
    Producer
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    la stanza delle necessità
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    13 minutes 4 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 6, 2026
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    Italy, United Kingdom
  • Language:
    Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    digital
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Festival del Cinema Pirata
    San Benedetto del Tronto
    Italy
    June 27, 2026
    Official Selection
  • Unarchive Found Footage
    ROMA
    Italy
    April 29, 2026
    Riuso di Classe
Director Biography - Ilaria Giaccio

Ilaria Giaccio (Rome, 1992) works at the intersection of art publishing, archival research, and screenwriting. Since 2018 she has been working at the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, where she coordinates the production of art books and exhibition catalogues, overseeing the entire process, from concept development to publication, with an approach that combines editorial curation and cultural project development. She is also editor in chief of ARTnews Italia magazine.
Alongside her editorial work, she has collaborated as a screenwriter on the film Fuoco d’Agosto by Tommaso Acquarone (currently in development), combining her interest in cinematic language with her literary background.
Between 2016 and 2018 she collaborated with Nacne Production on archival research and as a script assistant for documentaries such as Life as a B-Movie. Piero Vivarelli (presented at the 76th Venice Film Festival and winner of the Nastro d’Argento) and La Dodicesima Battaglia di Schiavi e Laino.
She writes for ARTnews Italia, Exibart, Treccani, and Nido Magazine, of which she was co-founder and editor-in-chief.
Her research focuses on memory, identity, and visual culture. She holds a degree in Modern Philology and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Historical Sciences at the University of Bologna, focusing on narratives of the contemporary. Her work today moves across publishing, cinema, and historical research.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

For more than ten years I have been recording my daily life and the lives of my friends with a camera. What began as a spontaneous gesture, filming to pass the time, to observe ourselves, to play with identity, gradually became a personal archive.
My work explores the relationship between memory, intimacy, and the camera as a device of self-construction. I am particularly interested in the moment when the camera stops being a neutral witness and becomes an extension of the self.
Through the use of personal archives, imperfect images, and diaristic fragments, I investigate how private gestures of recording can transform into collective narratives. My practice moves between documentary, essay film, and experimental cinema, using archival material as a living body of memory.
Rather than reconstructing the past, my work seeks to observe how time reshapes images and how personal memories can resonate with a broader generational experience.