Costanza Julia Bani

Costanza Julia Bani is an artist, filmmaker, and producer working internationally. Her practice is rooted in documentary across multiple formats, with an increasing focus on immersive media. She is Assistant Professor in Film and Media Production at Stockholm University of the Arts, a researcher at the NAVET Centre, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), and Course Manager of the ISFF Berlin Producer Programme. She is an EAVE graduate, a participant in the Cannes Producers Network, and an alumna of TorinoFilmLab (TFL)and Circle, as well as a Sundance Grantee. 2023 she has joined the Stockholm-based production company Fellonica Film AB. Selected productions include Darkness Matters (multiscreen installation, 2024; fulldome version, 2026); After Work(CPH:DOX 2023, competition, associate producer); Heart of an Astronaut (Visions du Réel 2023, competition); All of Our Hearts Are Connected Through Exploding Stars (Visions du Réel 2022, associate producer); Duduk (aka Bitter Apricot) (2019); Little Black Dress (2017); The Forgotten Army (2016); Constructing Sochi (2013); Der Kampf um die Freiheit (2013); Max Beckmann (2012); and Rushes (2012).

At the panel THINK BIG:

“Darkness Matters” is an evolving multimedia project that investigates darkness as an essential ecological, cultural, and perceptual condition. Originally developed as a hybrid work combining moving image, sound, research-based storytelling, and site-specific practices, the project addresses the impact of light pollution on nocturnal ecosystems and sensory perception, foregrounding darkness as a shared habitat across species, as a space of coexistence.

Its development into a fulldome film marks a conceptual and formal shift: from multi-screen and installation-based formats toward planetarium, from human-centered observation toward an immersive, other-than-human perspective.

The dome enables multispecies storytelling, a non-anthropocentric visual language, where scale, orientation, and duration invite the audience to inhabit nocturnal worlds rather than observe them from a distance. This transition allows Darkness Matters to integrate scientific research, environmental data, and poetic narration into a spatial experience that mirrors the complexity of ecosystems thriving in darkness. The fulldome format becomes both a narrative and ethical tool, recalibrating perception, decentering the human gaze, and fostering ecological attentiveness in an era of planetary over-illumination.