Find the Others
How Grief Became a Global Stage of Inspiration and Healing for Elisabetta Caraccia

That belief, Elisabetta Caraccia told me, is the reason Ray of Light Awards exists at all.

"As an anthropologist, I know that the reality we live in is informed by the stories we tell ourselves," she said. "So if we tell better and more uplifting stories, we will be able to create for ourselves a better and more uplifting reality." She has spent nearly two decades on the island of Ibiza testing that idea in practice, and this past May, the festival she built around it closed its second edition having reached further than she ever expected.

Ray of Light Awards, known to the community that has formed around it as ROLA, ran its 2026 program across seven days and five venues, from May 25 through May 31, under the theme "When Water Meets Earth," closing with a Grand Finale gala inside the Baluarte de Santa Lucía, the sixteenth-century fortress crowning Dalt Vila's UNESCO World Heritage old town.

I sat down with Caraccia in the weeks before the festival opened its second edition, in the quiet ahead of what would become the busiest week of her year. "I think part of our mission is to find the others," she told me as we began, and it set the tone for everything that followed. Caraccia moved to Ibiza in 2008, drawn back to the island after years of travel that, in her words, "made me fall in love with this planet, and all the people and creatures that inhabit it." She met the actor Ray Stevenson in 2004, and after realizing their infant daughter had already logged twenty-one flights between them, the couple decided, as Caraccia put it, that they "needed to take a pause" and find a home. They chose to spend a winter in Ibiza, and that winter never really ended. In 2021, she said, "completely unexpected," they became the owners, or as she prefers to call it, the godparents, of a small boutique hostel in the island's Salinas natural park.

In May 2023, while filming in Italy, Stevenson suffered a heart attack and, as Caraccia describes it, "left his body." What followed, she told me, was "a whole new chapter of our existence, a chapter based on a new kind of relationship, with one of us still on this planet and the other on the other side of the veil." She credits everything she had learned on the island, and the people who had crossed her path there, with helping the family avoid what she calls a complete fracture. "This body is really just a tiny part of ourselves," she said. "I knew it before coming here, but this island really anchored that belief even deeper in every little bit of my being, the physical and the non-physical."

She held Stevenson's farewell ceremony on a beach in Ibiza, where roughly three hundred people gathered. "Thanks to this community, thanks to the embracing of this island, all the creativity that we were surrounded with," she said, describing the songs, the rituals, and what she remembers as an outpouring of love. "They held us so strong that we created something." Friends of Stevenson's who had flown in from the film industry were visibly moved, and one of them, his close friend Simon Mirren, approached Caraccia afterward and asked permission to honor Stevenson every year on the island.

The structure Caraccia designed has held across both editions, expanding this year into a full week of programming built around a sequence of thematic days. The Gaia Award, which she describes as recognizing that "women are the ones that are gonna be able to guide the shift towards a more prosperous future," went to Kopenawa: Dreaming the Earth Forest, a documentary from directors Taina De Luccas and Marco Altberg centered on Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, the shaman and lifelong defender of the Yanomami people.

Last year's edition surfaced an unexpected volume of submissions exploring father and child relationships, which Caraccia took as a sign. "I think this is a sign we have to look into that relationship," she remembers thinking, "because it's true that until you heal fatherhood, a lot of us in our society are coming from a very traumatic relationship with the patriarchs, and it's been very traumatic for men as well." The resulting Fatherhood Award went to Paper Bag Plan, Anthony Lucero's story of a father and his son navigating disability together.

Two categories are built specifically around age. Next Generation, honoring content made for younger audiences, went to Bird Drone, an animated short from Australia. Caraccia's urgency around this category is personal: she is raising three boys, and she described reading that suicide rates among children have been climbing sharply since the pandemic, even in family-oriented cultures. "If we don't stop as adults and try to pour into our collective awakening, our collective stories," she said, "we really have to look closely at what our mind and our heart are receiving from our ears and our eyes." Young Creators, for storytellers twenty-five and under, went to ALAIA, a short film about water and consciousness directed by Oliver Coast Sullenger, who also received a one-year scholarship from Imaginarium Film Academy as part of the prize.

The award that carries Ray's own name, Ray of Light, screened nominees including the world premiere of Frequency: The Secret of Everything alongside Just Our Heart and The Energy That Heals. Caraccia calls this category "a mandatory expansion for me and the boys," content built to stretch an audience "beyond the empirical world." The Music Award went to the singer and composer Paz Shanti, ahead of a Music Awards night closing with a performance from the Spanish artist Alex Serra. Music holds a particular place in Caraccia's thinking about the festival's mission. "When you speak about frequency and uplifting humanity, music is the direct tool that can be used, because it's pure frequency and it's a universal language," she told me.

Two further honors carry no film submission at all. This year's Legacy Award recognized Satish Kumar, reflecting Caraccia's belief that "the youth can really flourish only if the elders are living a good legacy." The Ibiza Award went to Creative for the Planet, an organization working to protect the island's environment through art and education, an honor built to celebrate what Caraccia calls the island's role as "a melting pot of ideas and things."

Much of this year's expanded programming unfolded in collaboration with Fantasía Ibiza Festival, the island's interdisciplinary arts gathering now in its fourth edition, a partnership that let ROLA move its closing celebration into Dalt Vila's historic squares. Most of the panels and screenings remained free to attend, which Caraccia describes as essential to the festival's purpose, even as the two large evening galas remain costly to stage. "It is a labor of love, that is for sure," she said. "The objective is to share, share as much, share far and wide, these beautiful messages that these creators and these artists have to bring to the world."

Caraccia is careful to credit the island itself as much as any individual behind the festival. "This island is giving so much to all of us foreigners," she told me. "We're a pretty incredible international community that have found home on this small little piece of land in the south of the Mediterranean, but we all find our sense of belonging here, even though we're so different from each other." The Ibiza Award, she said, exists specifically to give something back. She is equally quick to credit the circle of Ray's industry friends who have lent their presence to the platform since its earliest days, among them Rosario Dawson, Mads Mikkelsen, Luke Evans, Kevin McKidd, and Ivanna Sakhno.

What stayed with me longest from our conversation was how directly Caraccia connects her personal loss to the festival's philosophy of attention. "It's always a little bit about the stories," she said, describing how she has chosen, deliberately and daily, to focus on what her family has gained rather than what it lost. "We don't have Ray anymore, but I can shift my attention to the fact that now me and the boys have a superhuman father and man who can really guide us and do a lot of things for us that he wouldn't have been able to do when he was still on earth."

She extends that same generosity to the creators ROLA platforms. "Artists are not even creators per se," she told me. "They are more like channeling things that are needed, and they're able to give it their own shape and offer it to us. I'm so thankful to them, and I really hope I can be of some help in their flourishing." As the festival's second edition closes and plans for a third begin to take shape, that same instinct, the discipline of redirected attention, remains at the center of what ROLA has built: a stage, for one week each May, for the stories aiming toward the light.