Venice, March 21st, 2025. Yesterday, at the 15th edition of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival, the traditional Special Jury Program took place. The jury of the International Competition – composed by Alessandra Infascelli, Malou Lévêque, and Barbara Biddulph – came on stage to tell the public in the Auditorium about their story and art. The event started with a conversation between Maria Roberta Novielli and the famous producer Alessandra Infascelli, who recalled personal experiences linked to Italian film genre produced in the 1970s. Following, the French director Malou Lévêque, the second and youngest member of the jury, presented her short film, La verité (highly appreciated by her colleague Alessandra Infascelli). Her work combines the themes of youth distress and hope with dualities and semantic reflections. The event was concluded by Barbara Biddulph, animation designer of stop-motion and art director for highly successful animated series such as Bob the Builder and films like Fantastic Mr. Fox, who showed the extreme passion and care that can be found in the backstages of stop motion animation, revealing the most technical parts of her artistic process.
Today opened with the VideoConcorso “Francesco Pasinetti”, where a selection of nine videos from the previous edition, the 22nd, were shown. One of them was Grandmother Wore Us Out, an animation belonging to the Corto Kids section, created during a workshop by boys and girls from the Gaza refugee camps. Col Salso sui Ossi instead underlined the link between the VideoConcorso and Venice. Later on, some videos —created by some Ca’ Foscari Students but not only— were presented in the context of the recurrent program Young Filmmakers at Ca’ Foscari. This year the space is dedicated to Venice Nights – Fading Beauty, a work by the young “cafoscarino” Matteo Tonelli, followed by a selection of videos taken from the project Desktop Super Shorts of Professor Miriam de Rosa and some short films directed by students from the summer school Films in Venice and Filming Venice.
The day continued with a special program curated by Cecilia Cossio, dedicated to commemorating the renowned Indian director and screenwriter Kumar Shahani, who passed away in Kolkata on February 24th of the previous year. A protagonist of the New Cinema of the late 60s and winner of various awards for his cinematographic productions, in 2014 he was also a member of the jury in the International Competition of the Festival, where he was highly regarded both for his artistic contributions and his personal qualities. In his memory, a screening of his 1991 documentary Immanence was held, since it is considered one of the greatest films about dancing. The program then kept close to the realm of Asian cinema with the presentation of three short films included in the special section East Asia Now, curated by Stefano Locati. As in previous editions, this was the result of a careful study of current trends in the contemporary film scene of East Asia and South-East Asia. The central theme that has emerged from this year’s selection is periphery —spatial, social, and generational— portrayed through the pure and hopeful perspectives of children. The three works presented were I am not invisible by Yuki York, a Japanese documentary set in the suburbs of Tondo, Philippines, where the local community assists the director in the exploration of his own origins; Morlam by Tanaseth Tulyathan from Thailand, which narrates the life of a blind child and his efforts to survive by begging on the streets of Bangkok. Finally, And I talk like a river by Chinese director Qian Ning, in which the emotional and significant encounter between a troubled child entrusted to a temple and another so-called "monster-child" is depicted.
The daily programme was further enriched by a commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of Casanova through the special section “The World of Casanova and Fellini”. For this event, Gianfranco Angelucci was invited to present his documentary E il Casanova di Fellini?. Angelucci, known as a writer, director, and journalist, was also the screenwriter of Fellini’s film Intervista (1987) and a close associate of the renowned director from Romagna area. By narrating his experience on stage at the Auditorium, he granted the audience exclusive insights and behind-the-scenes anecdotes. These served to further enrich the documentary experience and highlight the celebration of two figures—Fellini and Casanova—who, despite belonging to different historical periods, remain equally fascinating and influential within both the cinematic sphere and broader cultural imagination.
A moment was also reserved for WeShort, the first on-demand platform for short films, which was celebrated through a special message from its founder, Alessandro Loprieno, on its five-year anniversary and ongoing collaboration with the festival.
Six short films from the International Competition were screened today, starting with the animated movie The worst kind of pain, marking the directorial debut of Brazilian Ana Clara Miranda Lucena. She decided to show the pressing problem of gender-based and obstetrical violence using stop-motion technique to guide a one-dimensional string in her short. The festival continued with the film Match by Maria Sayegh from Lebanon, whose characters —nurses, taxi drivers, migrant workers— have to deal with the capitalist background of illegal organ trafficking network and its profit. Next came L'attaque, the second Italian short in the competition, directed by Aureliana Bontempo, which describes the relationship between two sisters, Aurora and Emma. In the short, they are forced to tackle a world of monsters that they didn’t know existed. The programme continued with the short movie The Letter, directed by the Kazakh director Ernat Sabitov, which shows the horror of the war through the concerns and the hopes of a family waiting for the return of a soldier from the front. This was followed by Love From the Shadow by Ale Gálvez, a Chilean director who narrated the loneliness of Marta, a phone scammer who, on Mother’s Day, pretends to have a terminal illness to convince her daughter to meet her. The programme ended with the Serbian short movie Home, by Danilo Bjelica, the heartbreaking story of a man who, after forty years of living with his wife, is forced to make the difficult decision to admit his wife to a clinic, because of her Alzheimer's disease.
The third day of the festival will end with one of the most awaited events of this 15th edition, a masterclass conducted by the animator and illustrator Roberto Catani, who will be its protagonist.
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