LORENZO MATTOTTI CREATED THE POSTER FOR THE FESTIVAL’S 11TH EDITION
THREE NEW PARTNERS HAVE JOINED THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL: WESHORT, CARPENÈ-MALVOLTI AND GIORNATE DELLA LUCE DI SPILIMBERGO
THE FIRST SPECIAL PROGRAM HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED: THE ITALIAN FEMALE CINEMA MADE BY MEMBERS OF MUJERES NEL CINEMA
The eleventh edition of Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival takes shape. This year’s edition will be held in-person from the 6th to the 9th of October 2021 in Venice, again in a “widespread” way, starting from its historic 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 the occasion, the Festival renewed its partnership with Lorenzo Mattotti, internationally renowned artist who created this edition’s poster, continuing the ongoing collaboration with famous Italian illustrators and comic book artists after Igort and Giorgio Carpinteri. This year’s poster is as straightforward as effective: the “look into the camera” of a young girl whose dark eyes go beyond the bidimensionality of the paper and seem prepared to face any obstacle with confidence. A spirit that adapts well to the festival and to the 300 volunteers from Ca’ Foscari who contributed to the Short, as the artist himself stated: “I chose this image because I think it can represent the students while they look to the future intelligently.”
Lorenzo Mattotti was a member of Valvoline, the art group from Bologna that shook up 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). Involved for a long time in the world of movies, he made the drawings that link the episodes of the collective film Eros, he worked on Pinocchio by Enzo D’Alo and directed the animated movie The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, 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), as well as creating the latest posters for the Venice International Film Festival.
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 and Olga Levi and NH Venezia Rio Novo, joined by the recently announced National Museum of Cinema in Turin and the media outlet Guang Hua Cultures et Media. Joining them, three new prestigious partners that will contribute to enriching this year’s edition. WeShort, a young 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 – scientist and chemist as well as Founder of the Winery – and to the history of Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, UNESCO Heritage Sites. The winner will be announced during the festival. Ultimately, 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 program to a selection of shortfilms from last year’s edition of the Short.
The first special programs have begun to be announced. Accompanying the main and the two collateral competitions, they 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. An initiative that quickly passed 10,000 adhesions, including directors, workforce and students of the Italian cinema. The festival pays tribute to this important reality 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 understand the richness of our country’s female film heritage.
The full program 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.
