Industry

At the legendary Cinema Fulgor in Rimini, one of the symbolic places of Federico Fellini’s imagination, the second edition of the Italian Global Series Festival hosted on saturday, July 4, one of its most inspiring conversations: “Lost in Fellini”, featuring two major figures of contemporary American storytelling, Carlton Cuse and John Ridley.

Moderated by film critic and journalist Marco Spagnoli, the conversation brought together two creators whose work has helped shape the language of modern television. The event was part of the Italian Global Series Festival, running from July 3 to 11, 2026, with a programme dedicated to international series, creative talent and the evolution of serialized narratives. For Formatbiz, attending the session was a rare opportunity to listen to two authors who have made audiences dream, question and reflect through stories capable of addressing both imagination and reality.

Carlton Cuse, the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning writer, producer and showrunner behind Lost, Bates Motel, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, The Strain, Colony, Locke & Key and Five Days at Memorial, discussed how serialized storytelling has evolved into a space where mystery, character and emotional truth can coexist over long narrative arcs. His work on Lost, in particular, remains one of the clearest examples of how television can become a global cultural phenomenon, combining mythology, suspense, collective memory and deeply human questions.

John Ridley Academy Award winner for 12 Years a Slave, brought to the conversation the perspective of an author whose work has often confronted the complexities of identity, power, discrimination and historical trauma. From American Crime to Guerrilla and Five Days at Memorial, Ridley has consistently used storytelling as a way to explore the moral fractures of society.

One of the most powerful moments of the conversation came with the screening of clips from Five Days at Memorial, the Apple TV+ limited series co-created by Carlton Cuse and John Ridley and based on the investigative book by Sheri Fink. The series reconstructs the tragic events that followed Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, focusing on what happened inside Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans.

Without electricity, surrounded by rising water and waiting for rescue, doctors and nurses found themselves isolated and forced to confront extreme ethical dilemmas involving the most fragile patients. Through this story, Cuse and Ridley explored the necessity of telling the truth in all its dramatic complexity, showing how real-life catastrophe can become the basis for a narrative that questions responsibility, power, survival and moral decision-making.

The clips underlined the strength of their collaboration: Cuse’s command of complex serialized structure and Ridley’s sharp moral and political gaze come together in a work that goes beyond the disaster genre. Five Days at Memorial becomes a form of civic memory, a way to preserve the emotional and institutional consequences of one of the darkest moments in recent American history.

The setting of Rimini added another layer to the conversation. Speaking in Fellini’s hometown, inside a cinema so closely linked to his legacy, Cuse and Ridley reflected on the director’s imagery and on its possible influence on modern serialized storytelling. The dreamlike atmosphere, the grotesque, the unexpected beauty of everyday life, the tension between reality and fantasy: all these elements, so central to Fellini’s cinema, can still be felt in many contemporary series, including Lost, where mystery and human fragility constantly intersect.

Ridley also offered a particularly revealing image of himself as an artist. At one point during the event, he took out his camera and began taking photographs. It was a small gesture, but almost symbolic of his creative stature: observing reality, collecting fragments of daily life, and transforming them into narrative. As he also told the local press, he carries a Leica with him and often photographs people, notes and objects around him. Before being a writer or director, he said he would have liked to be a photographer.