The 7th edition of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival will take place from 15th-18th March at Auditorium Santa Margherita in Venice. The Festival, carried out with the collaboration of the Venice Foundation, is the first festival in Europe entirely conceived, organized and managed by a university. An event thought out for young people by young people, directed by Roberta Novielli, which involves volunteer university students in every stage of the Festival. The manifesto this year is designed by Italian artist Giorgio Carpinteri, who is also receiving a homage during the festival.
The 30 short films in the international competition come from 25 countries and 29 different cinema schools. From these three are Italian: Né leggere, né scrivere with Roberto Citran brings Italy in the 60s back to life, and his didactic television inside a history of personal growth, whilst SELFIEsh takes us back to contemporaneity, dealing with the recovery of a direct relationship with loved ones, from whom we are often distracted, lost between compulsive photos and social networks. Under the surface you are never alone is also directed by an Italian, a drama tinted with horror on the effects that trauma can have on the mind of a troubled woman. Alternate reality features in many works in the competition: whether it’s about nightmares like in the Australian work Petrel or in the Polish film The Inquest, or whether it’s about a distorted psyche like in Brazilian film Enzo and French film Claire, or even still, an ‘invented’ reality for bad deeds, like in Korean work I Saw It and German film Goldfish. Within the competition are also 2 documentaries and 3 short animations. To announce the Grand Prix and the Volumina Special Mention, there will be an international jury composted of eclectic French artist Catherine Breillat, Polish actress Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, and English animator Barry Purves, who will also be the key figures of a special program dedicated to them. Among the prizes given out this year there will also be the first “Pateh Sabally” Prize, dedicated to the boy who tragically drowned in the Grand Canal last January, whilst the Levi Prize for best soundtrack will be awarded by a specifically assigned jury.
To accompany the competition there will be special programmes, homages and prestigious master classes, starting from the one run by Takahashi Hiroshi, Japanese screenwriter for the original The Ring trilogy and true master of fear. Also from Japan is Iimen Masako, one of the greatest interpreters in the world of sand art animation techniques, which the public will be able to admire in the program dedicated to her and then live in a performance during the Closing Ceremony. The show dedicated to Indian Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni will allow the audience to discover cinema of one of the most important directors in the Marathi language with the projection of four short films, Kulkarni’s favourite form of expression. This year, looking to the past will go in two directions, starting with Desiderio in movimento, a special on the first forms of publicity that demonstrates how cinema immediately associated the idea of visual persuasion to that of the promotion ever since Lumiere, passing through Méliès and Walt Disney, up until a fun promo of Laurel & Hardy. Then it will move to the discovery of original Swiss cinema with rare films from the archive where, through urban and natural performances of surprising beauty, excelled personalities such as William Tell and visiting Hollywood stars such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. It will return to contemporaneity with the homage to Volumina, discovering the multimedia art-books dedicated to cinema produced by this Turin picture house, with the premiere of Peter Greenaway’s installation at the Reggia di Venaria. A look at the most sustainable tendencies in filmmaking will be guaranteed by the special dedicated to the students of the University Waseda in Tokyo, the real bed of talent where the most important Japanese directors have studied, to ECAM through the organization of the Madrid en corto competition, for very heterogeneous works but already mature from a cinematographic point of view and, finally, to students on the Ca’ Foscari’s Digital Cinema Programme, who present their “degree short”, a free adaption of a story by Dino Buzzati. The most beloved dates of the Short return, beginning with Lo sguardo sospeso, dedicated to the most recent Italian videoart with a selection of six pieces on behalf of Visualcontainer, through to Anymation, an animation workshop that this year is concentrating on its relationship with publicity and its representation of monotony in modern life. Finally there will also be the selection of winners from the latest VideoConcorso Pasinetti, and works such as the fun game Video-oke!, an application of karaoke to cinematography suitable both for young people who are drawn to cinema, and for adults to finally become the stars and reinterpret their favourite scenes. In the collateral competition, the three finalists of the Concorso scuole del Veneto, this year in collaboration with Quindici19 and dedicated to aspiring directors of the region, will be shown, together with the 4th edition of the “Olga Brunner Levi” Prize, in collaboration with the Olga Foundation and Ugo Levi, dedicated to women in music, and finally, making its debut, the Video Music Competition, a competition for music videos made by cinema students and universities from all over the world.
