A special program by Stefano Locati
This year the usual foray into the production of East Asian short films is tinged with obsession and paranoia, perhaps capturing the common feeling in the face of the unpredictability of the Covid-19 pandemic. The selected short films observe with different techniques and production methods – from animation to live cinema, from the dreamlike to the grotesque, from the limited budget to the no-budget – the naked nerves of society. They do not necessarily do it from a medical and social point of view, but each deepens with greater vehemence a fragment of reality (the memories of the parents, the alienation at work, the impossibility of human contact during the lockdown), trying to obtain a sense also ironic from these times out of sixth. A selection that has already tried its hand at major festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Hong Kong) and which once again confirms the vitality of the short format in these countries.
Dream / Kkum
Director: Kim Kang-min
South Korea, 8’
A dreamlike, almost lysergic journey through the maze of the dreams and memories of the mother by the narrator. With a minimal design set, lighting attentive to shadows and nuances and an unprecedented black and white, Kim Kang-min gives life to a microcosm of obsessions between the ancestral and the psychoanalytic, in which sugar cubes come to life by evoking a almost mysterious astonishment.
Excuse Me Miss, Miss, Miss
Director: Sonny Calvento
Philippines, 16’
Vangie works in a department store, but is about to be fired. In a desperate attempt to save her job, she makes a puzzling discovery about her superior to her. Sonny Calvento, an emerging talent of Filipino cinema, with already an amazing feature film behind him (The Decaying / Nabubulok, 2017), mixes musical, grotesque and science fiction in this satire on corporatism and alienation.
What a Day / Watto a dei
Director: Horii Ayaka
Japan, 18’
Backward reconstruction of a drink between friends at the time of the lockdown. The young Horii Ayaka uses a comic-surreal register to tell the nostalgia of human contacts. Through the split screens that these months of continuous videocall have accustomed us to, she intersects the memories of the three participants, adding a pinch of magic.
