Venice, March 17th 2025. Anymation is the title for the Pre-opening Special Event of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival which will be held tomorrow: any animation form will be represented and valorized.
Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival, the first film festival in Europe to be entirely developed, organized and managed by a university, is scheduled to take place from March 19th to 22nd in a “widespread” format in seven venues, including museums and cultural institutions in the city, with many screenings, all with free admission. The main venue will be the Auditorium Santa Margherita – Emanuele Severino. It is at this Auditorium that Anymation, the special pre-opening event, will take place. Starting at 2 p.m., it will offer the festival’s audience a rich overview of the world of animation, including debates, screenings, and presentations of new projects. The program will also be a tribute to Giannalberto Bendazzi, the greatest Italian animation scholar, friend of the festival and member of the jury for the sixth edition, who recently passed away.
The program will begin with a round table discussion in which leading scholars in the field from the Animation group of the Consulta Universitaria del Cinema (CUC) and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia will take part. In particular, Cristina Formenti, Alessandra Richetto, Martina Vita, Roberta Novielli, Paola Bristot, and Igor Imhoff will be present. The round table will be an opportunity to reflect on the role of animation in cinema and television, its vast technological possibilities, and the interdisciplinary nature of the field, which intersects with related realms and languages, from comics to virtual reality.
Up next, more than twenty short films will be screened, representing (almost) all existing techniques and a wide geographical variety, confirming the global interest towards this expressive form. The screenings will be divided into three segments: a special tribute to the Piccolo Festival dell’Animazione, introduced by director Paola Bristot, a showcase of animated shorts produced at the Estonian Academy of Arts, presented by the animator Francesco Rosso and a selection of animation works featured in the Tokyo Student Film Festival.
The Piccolo Festival dell’Animazione – that has now reached its eighteenth edition – is one of the Short's new partner festivals and it's the only festival in Friuli Venezia Giulia dedicated to this field, while also maintaining strong ties with Central and Eastern Europe. The festival aims to present the best production of contemporary animation cinema, with a special focus on new technologies, while also paying attention to the historical aspect. The selection presented at the Short includes nine short films, made over the past two years, that stand out for the great variety of their techniques.
Founded in Tallinn in 1914, the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) is the oldest and the only public university of visual culture in Estonia. It opened its animation department in 2006 and has trained a new generation of animators, encouraging them to develop innovative and personal styles and journeys. The selected works, which are fourteen overall, cover different narrative techniques and have been produced by both master and undergraduate students.
The Tokyo Student Film Festival, on the other hand, can be considered by all means a twin Festival to the Short, as it is the biggest and longest-running cinema festival in Japan entirely managed by students; on its 35th edition, it was held in one of the most notorious “youth” districts, Shibuya. The selection, which will be directly presented by its curator, Keiko Kusakabe, includes the screening of five Japanese animated shorts from the last two editions of the festival and it showcases the strong vitality that Japan has always been known for in the animation field.
The event will conclude with the presentation of ImmersiVenice, a new project by Ca’ Foscari aimed at supporting and stimulating the technological and scientific developments of immersive media through production and education, a meeting space and opportunities for all the individuals involved in the department and through the oversight of the projects’ evolution at all stages. The stated goal is to become a reference point in shaping and spreading a culture of immersive language. Built on a network of international collaborations, the presentation will introduce some of the most innovative results in the performative field through the work of three important individuals on the project's team: the Italian digital artist and animator Igor Imhoff, the sound engineer and immersive sound design specialist Davide Tiso, and the American multimedia artist and director Mika Johnson.
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