by Mizue Mirai
Producer: Keiko Kusakabe
Animation
France/Japan, 2013, 8’
After the World Premiere at the Berlinale, Keiko Kusakabe is going to present the Italian preview screening of Wonder, the latest animation work by Mirai Mizue. Born in 1981, since the beginning of year 2000 Mizue has been working with a form of conceptual animation which makes him more similar to a video artist. In 2011, after presenting his short movie Modern n.2 in the Orizzonti section at the 68th Venice Film Festival, he became well known on the international scene. His works have been screened during film festivals all over the World, and have been awarded in Japan, Croatia and Canada. His new project Wonder, presented in the “short” section at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival, is another among the many creative expressions of his spirit. Indeed, Mizue created clips lasting only one-second, which display 24 handmade drawings, one for each photogram, and uploaded them on Youtube every single day for an entire year. This project, which was made possible thanks to a crowd-funding operation through Kickstarter, and with the collaboration of other 160 illustrators, was completed on March 31st, 2013. Mizue then devoted himself to a long post-production work, completed with the addition of the Pascals striking music. The 365 video inserts containing 8.760 drawings were then put together to set up the animation short Wonder. With the animal and plant world as main subjects, this work is the reflection of the author’s poetry, with its shimmering and variable forms which cross one another and with a display of astonishingly bright colours. The incredible fluency of its animation perfectly blends with the music, serious but playful at the same time, and it gives birth to an extraordinary experience, both from the visual and the acoustic point of view. A respectable expression of a sense of wonder, which is the title of the work as well.
di Kumar Shahani
Music: Rupak
Flute: Kulkarni
Song: Ramesh Panchal
Production: Pundole Art Gallery
Documentary
India, 2004, 22′
As the Crow Flies is an aesthetic exploration of the works by the eminent painter Akbar Padamsee, a contemporary Indian artist and painter, considered as one of the pioneers of Indian modern painting. Oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, computer graphics and photography are the various mediums he has used over the years. He has also worked as a film maker, a sculptor, a photographer, an engraverand a lithographer. In 1962 he was awarded with the Lalit Kala Ratna by the Lalit Kala Akademi, India’s National Academy of Arts; he also received the Kalidas Samman for Plastic Arts from the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1997 and in 2010 he was bestowed with the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civil honour. Director Kumar Shahani has in common with Padamsee the interest for art, aesthetics and philosophy, and converses with the artist via the sound of the city, the music of Gnan, and images that spiral into cocoon-like structures of meditative space. Produced by the Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, the film reveals Shahani’s cinematic vision, as well as some crucial moments of the cognitive approach which gives life to a Padamsee painting.
Written and directed by Luca Miniero
Art Director: Elisa Anzini
Cinematographer: Federico Angelucci
Cast: Paola Casella, Armando De Matteis, Vasco Ippoliti
Filmmaster Productions
Italy, 2012, 8’
Shot in the sweeping stretch of wheat at the limit between Bisaccia and Calitri and in some striking spots in the historical centre of Bisaccia, this short movie’s main character is the little Armando, a 8-year old boy grown in the wheat fields. Everybody says he is a dreamer: indeed, Armando loves the sea, even if he has never seen it, and thanks to the fantasy and candour typical of children he builds a ship which sets out in a sea of spikes blown by the wind. Armando’s dream becomes a metaphor of Grano Armando’s pasta, made by De Matteis Agroalimentare the short refers to, testifying a a pleasure born sixty years before and still uncontaminated, a pure value, lile a kid’s playful creation. In the campaign created by Red Cell and made by Filmmaster Productions, through emotions and irony Luca Miniero succeeds in giving us a clear description of the human relationships which give life to the rural environment where the famous pasta factory has been founded in the Campania regione.
