THE NEW HORROR MOVIES TALENT MASTERCLASS, ROB SAVAGE
THE FIRST WORKS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITON: RANGING FROM MANY GENRES AND STYLES, FROM THE POST-APOCALYPTIC TO THE DARK COMEDY, FROM ANIMATION TO DOCUMENTARY
DISCOVERING NEW ASIAN TRENDS WITH EAST ASIA NOW AND SHORT FILMS BY THE SUMMER SCHOOL OF THE VENICE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
TODAY THE PRE-OPENING WITH A SHORT FILM BY THE MASTER IN FINE ARTS IN FILMMAKING’S STUDENTS AND A LECTIO MAGISTRALIS
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The thirteen edition of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival will start very soon. From Wednesday 22nd, the Santa Margherita Auditorium and other five Venetian locations will host a great variety of short films, guests and special programs, until the closing ceremony, which will take place on Saturday. This is the first festival in Europe entirely conceived, organized and managed by a university and, thanks to the coordination of the Artistic and Organizational Director Roberta Novielli, it offers a high-quality selection of thirty short films which are part of the International Competition, made by Film Schools and Universities’ students coming from 28 different countries. The Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival will host very important guests, such as the Israelian film director Amos Gitai, the Palme d’Or-winning Hirokazu Koreeda, the father of the Italian animation Bruno Bozzetto, and the new horror talent Rob Savage.
Before that, the Short will give space to those who are willing to become film directors and are taking the first steps in the movie industry. The pre-opening of the festival will take place on Tuesday at 5 pm in the Santa Margherita Auditorium with the graduation ceremony for the Ca’ Foscari University’s students in the Master in Fine Arts in Filmmaking. The event will be enriched with a lectio magistralis from the movie critic Paolo Lughi and with the screening of a short film collectively produced by the MA students.
On Wednesday at 2 pm the Short will start with another special program dedicated to aspiring film directors who study in Venice. The protagonists will be the 25 international students that have attended the 4th Summer School of the Venice International University. This school aims to combine movie theory and practice in order to represent Venice. Six short films produced by the students during this experience will be screened. Later on, at 3 pm we will fly around the world with the East Asia Now, the first special program that for many years has been accompanying the festival and that now is part of its identity. Again this year, the program is curated by Stefano Locati, who will invite the audience to discover the last trends from Eastern Asia. The three chosen short films all focus on the theme of crisis from a female perspective, however starting from different assumptions: from the animated The Sea on the Day When the Magic Returns by Han Jiwon (South Korea), to the surrealism of the Bird Woman by Oohara Tokio (Japan), coming to the metanarrative mechanisms of the Aunt Lotus & Her Dream Bicycle by Kew Lin (Singapore).
Following the official opening ceremony of the thirteenth edition (at 5 pm), with the usual institutional greetings, we will welcome in the Auditorium one of the great guests of this year’s Festival, Rob Savage, who will hold a masterclass dialoguing with professor and cinema critic John Bleasdale (at 17:30). Despite having just turned thirty, Rob is already working on three features – apart from short films, tv series and commercials – among them is the recent Dashcam (2021) that transposes the subgenre of found footage to the social media era. He is one of the most promising directors in the landscape of contemporary horror, as shown by his newest collaboration with the genre’s guru, Sam Raimi, and by his upcoming movie, The Boogeyman, an adaptation of a work by one of the fathers of literary horror, Stephen King. During the masterclass, some of the director’s shorts will be screened, among them, the award-winning Dawn of the Deaf.
Closing the first day of the Festival, it will be the time for the first six works competing in the International Competition (at 20:00). Among the themes in this year’s Competition, that of migrants and their condition particularly stands out, for example in the short Bloody Gravel by Hojat Hosseini that follows a couple attempting to cross the border between Afghanistan and Iran to be able to live their love story. The selection of short films is wide, as shown by the other works that will be screened during Wednesday’s schedule. The program ranges from the French animation Tear Off, to As duas en punto, the Spanish documentary on two anarchical sisters. From the typically British humor of Not for Sale, to the Polish post-apocalyptic world of Rozkwit Zimowy, concluding with Runaway, tackling the difficult compromises that a family from Georgia must accept while living in Russia. These are the works that will open this year’s competition, establishing once again the Short as an exceptional observatory on young cinema, with a prestigious jury composed by Mika Johnson, multimedia artist specialized in virtual reality, Robb Pratt, longtime Disney animator, and Roberto Citran, who has been featured in many Italian big and small screen productions since the eighties. The three judges will award the main prizes, once again offered by Promovetro, as well as a work of art made of glass by artist Cosima Montavoci, protagonist of the project Mollified, together with Lorenzo Passi.
Last but not least, the Short will take place again in Venice in a “widespread” way, with other five venues aside from the Auditorium, allowing the audience to enjoy the programs in fascinating locations. On Wednesday we will start off with screenings at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and Museo Archeologico Nazionale.
