The building originated as a Franciscan Convent in 1478 and housed the pharmacy of friars including St. Savior of Horta; in 1765 it was ceded to the Piedmontese who planted the Tobacco Factory; the complex was expanded several times and in 1900 further modified to its present appearance. The Manifattura has always employed mostly female staff and is one of the historic sites of Cagliari’s working-class redemption. Closed in 2001, after restoration initiated by RAS in 2006 since 2016 it has been managed by Sardegna Ricerche. Today, its spaces host cultural, artistic, scientific, business and volunteer institutions and initiatives.
The following will be open for the event:
TAB – Puppet Art Theater
Founded by Antonio Murru and Donatella Pau in 1980, Is Mascareddas is a traveling puppet and marionette company that has been instrumental in spreading and raising awareness of figure theater in Sardinia, which until then was almost unknown on the island. He has made numerous productions, first following the traditional patterns of shack puppet theater and then experimenting with new animation techniques. From June 2021 Is Mascareddas opened the doors of TAB, the new venue: a permanent art residence inside the former Manifattura Tabacchi. The permanent exhibition of puppets and marionettes from more than 40 years of production, the Yorick Library, the construction workshop with tailoring, a stage space and offices have been set up in these premises, becoming a lively center of creation open to the public. Thus, in these spaces the creation of the animation show takes place, a metamorphosis that from the idea leads to the finished and distributed product just as in a factory the construction of a good destined for the community takes place.
The Company has participated and still participates in numerous National and International Festivals, and organizes well-established festivals and reviews such as Il Grande Teatro dei Piccoli, now in its nineteenth edition, and Anima IF, an international festival dedicated mainly to adult animation theater.
Humanitarian Society CSC – Sardinian Film Library
The Cagliari Cultural Services Center of the Humanitarian Society. was founded in 1963 as a project operating in the areas of film and book culture promotion, training, adult education and support for associations, establishing itself as the first public audio-visual, cultural and educational infrastructure in Sardinia. In 1966 it initiated the Cineteca Sarda project, which over time has built a rich archive of films (in every medium), the most important in Sardinia, which today constitutes the audio-visual historical memory of Sardinian society. The CSC and the Cineteca Sarda are facilities that cater to the entire citizenry, those working in culture and school users, through the loan of films and technical equipment, assistance with audiovisual programming in schools and association groups, promotion of thematic reviews of the various national, monographic and youth cinematographs, refresher activities for professionals working in the world of culture and education, and formative and educational experimentation with associations and all school and university levels. In recent years, the Cineteca has equipped itself with state-of-the-art equipment regarding restoration and digitization techniques, both of photographs and films in film and magnetic media. Since 2010, it has been promoting the project “Your memory is our history,” which aims at the recovery, preservation and digitization of family films in reduced format (8mm, Super8, 9.5mm and 16mm), with the goal of establishing a vast archive of family cinema in Sardinia, which already consists of about 12,000 films.
In 2023, the Cagliari CSC of the Società Umanitaria – Cineteca Sarda moved inside the premises of Sa Manifattura: from the entrance on vico I XX settembre you can access the offices, the restoration and digitization laboratories and the historical film archive. On the other hand, the media library, with the archive of films intended for public lending and the library specializing in cinema and mass communication, is located at 20 Via XX Settembre.
A small exhibition of vintage film instruments will be set up during Monumenti Aperti, and archival footage about the city of Cagliari and from the family film archive will be shown.
