Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival

From the 15th to 18th March 2017 the spotlight will turn to the Santa Margherita Auditorium in Venice for the seventh edition of Ca’ Foscari’s Short Film Festival. Becoming increasingly successful over the years, this year's edition features numerous confirmations and many novelties, such as the official poster, for the first time by artist Giorgio Carpinteri.
The festival, realized with the collaboration of the Venice Foundation, is dedicated to short films and is the first in Europe to be completely designed, organized and managed by a university (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice). Along with numerous special programmes, which will be announced at a press conference in Venice, on March 2nd, the heart of the festival is represented by the International Competition, a selection of thirty short films made by students from film schools and universities around the world.
There will be an exceptional jury to award the prizes, composed every year by three important personalities from the film world, beginning with the great filmmaker, actress and French writer Catherine Breillat, author of films like Fat Girl and Romance that have inflamed film debates for their free and explicit representation of sexuality. Another female presence is the Polish actress Malgorzata Zajaczkowska (known in the US as Margaret Sophie Stein), a celebrity in her own country who also starred in world famous films such as Bullets Over Broadway by Woody Allen. No less important is Barry Purves, a leading British animator who specializes in the technique of stop-motion and was nominated for an Academy Award for Screen Play; he has also worked with his animations to make films like Mars Attack! by Tim Burton and King Kong by Peter Jackson.
The visionary manifesto this year (a kind of Saint Sebastian of the Paleolithic, towards which different forces of the contemporary world convene: the perfect image to represent the multicultural dynamics of the Short Film Festival) was created by Giorgio Carpinteri who will be present at the festival to meet the public. Illustrator, cartoonist and painter, Carpinteri has worked with all major Italian comics magazines, from "Il Mago " to "Nemo", from "Frigidaire" to "Linus." His short stories were later collected in several volumes, including Flirt and Incrocio magico. In 1983 he was a founder of the Valvoline Motorcomics artist group, responsible for a comic supplement on the magazine "Alter Alter". The graphic novel by Carpinteri, Polsi sottili, published in those years, has recently been reissued in an elegant book published by Coconino Press. In subsequent years he has collaborated in numerous publications, including "La Dolce Vita", born from the Valvoline group. Since 1986 he has also been artistic director and author of television programmes, as well as author of posters and advertising campaigns.
Among the novelties of this seventh edition is the establishment of the first International Music Video Competition, a competition for music videos made by students of universities and film schools from all over the world. The competition, where the finalist works will be screened, is curated by Michele Faggi and enjoys collaboration with Indie-Eye, media partner of the festival who will grant the winner with publication of original content devoted to them.
To anticipate the event, the Ca' Foscari Short Film Festival will present Persistence of Revision, an event that will take place on February 8th at 4.30pm in Aula Magna Trentin in Venice, with the screening of the version restored by Ross Lipman of the famous Film (1965), a film that combines two geniuses of their respective arts, Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett, a copy of which has been preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The short film, long remained invisible, will be accompanied by the screening of extracts from Notfilm, cine-essay by Lipman that traces, through archive material and unedited interviews, the troubles that stemmed from the work and the fascinating non-cooperative relationship between the two artists. The programme will be presented by film historian - and collaborator of the festival - Carlo Montanaro, and has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Letizia Gatti and the distribution company Reading Bloom.