Find Your Wall First
The wall comes before everything else. A smooth, pale surface — an old warehouse façade, the blank end of a chandler's building, a boathouse that hasn't been painted since the nineties — is worth more than the best projector you can hire. Whitewash helps. Texture kills you. Walk the harbour in the afternoon, when the light is flat and honest, and look for the biggest uninterrupted expanse you can find. If the surface is slightly concave, you've found something rare. Take it.
Permission is the next thing, and in southern Italian ports it tends to be informal. The building belongs to someone's uncle. That uncle is usually at the bar by the water. Buy him a coffee — or better, a bicchiere of something local — explain what you're doing, and you'll likely find he's proud of the wall and happy for it to earn its keep one evening.
The Geometry of a Good Night
Set your projector distance by the surface, not by the chairs. A decent short-throw lens can give you a workable three-by-two-metre image from eight or nine metres back, which is enough for forty people sitting on upturned crates, fishing nets folded into cushions, and the occasional moped parked at the side as if it, too, bought a ticket. Keystoning is your enemy; shim the projector with whatever the harbour provides — rope coil, a folded jacket, a paperback of the wrong thickness.
Sound in open air loses its bottom end fast. Run audio through a pair of portable speakers positioned at audience height rather than projector height, angled inward. The sea will add its own ambient track regardless, which, depending on the film, is either the best thing that happens or a mild catastrophe.
Start late. The Mediterranean sky does not go properly dark until well after nine in high summer, often closer to ten. Fight it and you'll screen into washed-out grey; accept it and build the evening around the wait — granita, cold wine, conversation. By the time the picture is sharp, the audience is warm and the mood has already made the film half good before the first frame.
The fishermen, if you've chosen your wall well, will probably still be mending nets behind you. They won't watch. But they won't ask you to stop, either.