Lorenzo Mattotti creates poster for Short Film Festival’s 11th edition

The eleventh edition of Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival is taking shape. This year’s edition will be held in person from 6 to  9 October 2021 in Venice, starting from its traditional location, Auditorium Santa Margherita, and passing through some of the most important cultural institutions of Venice, including museums, foundations and cultural centers, which will host the festival’s screenings simultaneously.

For this edition, the Festival renewed its partnership with Lorenzo Mattotti, an internationally renowned artist who created this edition’s poster, continuing its collaboration with famous Italian illustrators and comic book artists such as Igort and Giorgio Carpinteri. This year’s poster is straightforward and effective: a woman “looks into the camera”, her dark eyes exceeding the bidimensionality of the paper as if they were prepared to face any obstacle with confidence. This confidence respresents the spirit of this festival and of the 300 volunteers from Ca’ Foscari who have contributed to the festival, as the artist himself stated: “I chose this image because I think it can represent the students and their intelligence as they look towards the future.”

Lorenzo Mattotti was a member of Valvoline, the art group from Bologna that revolutionised Italian comics through the pages of ‘Alter Alter’, where Mattotti published some of the works that made him famous, including Il Signor Spartaco (1982) and Fuochi (1984). Mattotti was involved for a long time in the world of movies and made the drawings that link the episodes of the collective film Eros. He also worked on Pinocchio by Enzo D’Alo and directed the animated movie The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily, which was screened in Cannes. Even though he has been living in Paris for years, Mattotti has maintained a special bond with Venice, where he lived during his university years and to which he dedicated the wonderful Venezia. Scavando nell’acqua (2011).

For an edition developed under such unusual conditions, the Short has been able to rely on the essential support of old and new partners, including Fondazione di Venezia and the historic Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi and NH Venezia Rio Novo, joined by the National Museum of Cinema in Turin and the media outlet Guang Hua Cultures et Media. Three new partners will also contribute to enriching this year’s edition. WeShort, a cinema on-demand platform which has become the reference point for the world of short movies. The partnership with WeShort will guarantee the digital distribution of some of the shorts selected for the Main Competition, allowing young directors to show their work around the world. A special partner is undoubtedly Carpenè-Malvolti, always attentive to the new languages of communication and visual research, that announced a contest open exclusively to the directors selected for the Main Competition and the Music Video Competition for a script that will be turned into a short film dedicated to Antonio Carpenè - a scientist and chemist as well as Founder of the Winery - and to the history of Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, which are UNESCO Heritage Sites. The winner will be announced during the festival. Finally, the festival established a partnership with Giornate della Luce di Spilimbergo, a festival dedicated to the masters of Italian cinematography, with a special jury that will award the prize for Best Cinematography to one of the films from the Competition. In June, Giornate della Luce dedicated a special programme to a selection of short films from last year’s edition of the Short Film Festival.

The first special programmes have begun to be announced. These programmes will enrich the main competition and the two collateral ones, and they will include retrospectives, tributes, workshops and much more. The first to be disclosed is Mujeres nel cinema, a group that was originally created on Facebook in October 2019 aiming to establish contact between Italian women working in movies in order to carry out new projects together. The group quickly gained 10,000 members, including directors, workforce and students of Italian cinema. The festival pays tribute to women in cinema with a selection of 24 short works on which the group’s members have worked on, divided into different categories: fiction, actresses/performers, music videos, experimental, documentaries and web series. The audience will have the chance to discover an extremely lively and rapidly developing artistic world that is going to help people understand the richness of our country’s female film heritage.

The full programme of the eleventh edition will be announced by the artistic director and manager Roberta Novielli during the press conference for the presentation of the festival, which will take place in September.