It is the beautiful new chess documentary that every fan of the game should see—whether you can make it to a film festival or stream it live on TV—and now it’s an award-winner.

The City Of Human Chess, Chess.com’s first venture into documentary film-making, was given rapturous applause and named Best Mid-Length Documentary over the weekend as it received its U.S. debut at the prestigious DOC LA Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival.

The film, now on general release via the streaming service MagellanTV, tells the story of how a truly unique and spectacular human chess game inspired by a 15th-century tale is put on in the small market town of Marostica in northern Italy.

The biennial event has been running for more than a century. It celebrates the local legend of Lionora, a beautiful woman who has two suitors madly in love with her. To avoid a duel, the two rivals are made to play a game of chess, with Lionora taking the winner as husband.

According to the story, Lionora’s father, the Lord of Marostica, insisted that the challenge be played out in real life with human chess pieces in the town’s main square, now popularly known as Piazza degli Scacchi, meaning Chess Plaza. 

The human chess game was first enacted in 1923 and has been a source of local pride ever since. Over time, the show has grown to involve more than 600 actors. There are soldiers, firebreathers, comedians, musicians, jugglers, and flagbearers. Fireworks and special effects light up the town, and everybody pitches in to make it happen.

In 2020, however, the performance was shelved due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, after a gap of four years, organizers were tasked with reviving it. The film follows locals as they battle to bring this unique tradition back to life in just 25 days. Managing it, as one organizer puts it, is a matter of “life or death.”

The film made its world premiere at the Not Film Festival in Italy in August. Already, it is receiving plaudits from the industry. Besides being selected to feature at the prestigious DOC LA, the film will also feature at the International Film Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, which runs from November 11 to 12.

Chess.com is pleased to announce the documentary streaming service MagellanTV has also secured global distribution rights to show The City Of Human Chess on its platform.

“We’re honored to showcase The City of Human Chess, the first documentary from Chess.com, on MagellanTV,” said Rob McEvily, MagellanTV’s Director of Digital Marketing. “Collaborating with the Chess.com team and sharing this story of tradition and passion has been a genuine pleasure.”

The 22-minute film was directed by the award-winning LA-based filmmaker Cecilia Albertini, and produced by Chess.com’s Creative Director Chandler Toffa. Albertini described it as a “labor of love” and said the entire production was filmed over just three weeks. She said:

We were a very small crew (a total of four people on set plus three more people in post-production), and this film was truly a labor of love. To have it screened at an important festival in Los Angeles means a lot to us! It’s so much fun to have our country and its traditions represented on screen at such an important festival, and we are so excited for people from all over the world to see it.

We did have a lot of fun, because all of us in the crew became friends very quickly, which made everything so much easier. It was still hard work, but at least we had fun while working. Also, there was a general vibe of excitement and joy in the city at the time of filming because everyone was gearing up for the event, which made everything feel very magical. Everyone we interviewed was very kind and generous with their time, which definitely helped.

We had a limited time to film this because we were staying in the town for only about three weeks. Therefore, we had to make the most of the time we had, and at the same time, we had to find the story; when we first started filming, we thought that the film was going to have a much more character-driven angle centering on the director of the performance, but as we continued filming, we realized that it was much more about the city itself and that it would be more of an ‘ensemble’ piece. This changed everything, and we had to adapt on the fly.

Scheduling interviews with everyone was also challenging because, at that time, everyone was so busy with prepping for the performance, and they didn’t have a lot of time for us. Luckily, everything lined up, and we were able to get all we needed.

My hopes are that it continues to play at big festivals and that it gets seen by as many people as possible. We recently secured distribution through MagellanTV, which is very exciting, so many more people will be able to stream it and watch it.

The City Of Human Chess is available to view now on MagellanTV and will be shown at the International Film Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, from November 11 to 12.