Short’s seventh edition revealed

THE DIRECTORS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION BETWEEN TWISTED REALITIES AND IRONIC DETACHMENT

THE MASTECLASS OF TAKAHASHI HIROSHI, SCREENWRITER OF “RING”

THE POSTER SIGNED BY GIORGIO CARPINTERI AND A TRIBUTED DEDICATED TO HIM

THE JURY: CATHERINE BREILLAT, FRENCH FILMMAKER, ACTRESS AND WRITER FAMOUS FOR HER PROVOCATIVE WORKS, MALGORZATA ZAJACZKOWSKA, POLISH ACTRESS WHO PLAYED FOR GREAT AUTHORS BOTH IN HER HOMELAND AND AT HOLLYWOOD, BARRY PURVES, ONE OF THE GREATEST ENGLISH ANIMATOR AND OSCAR NOMINEE.

SPECIAL PROGRAMS: THE SAND ART ANIMATION OF IIMEN MASAKO, PROTAGONIST ALSO OF THE CLOSING CEREMONY WITH A LIVE PERFORMANCE, THE FOCUS ON THE INDIAN DIRECTOR UMESH VINAYAK KULKARNI, A TRIBUTE TO VOLUMINA AND THEIR ARTBOOKS IN CINEMA. AT THE DISCOVERY OF THE YOUNG TALENTS OF THE WASEDA UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO AND OF ECAM, ORGANIZER OF MADRID EN CORTO. A NEW APPOINTMENT WITH THE ITALIAN VIDEO ART, WITH THE WORKSHOP ON ANIMATION AND WITH THE SHORT MOVIE MADE BY THE STUDENTS OF THE DIGITAL CINEMA COURSE OF CA’ FOSCARI.

AND MORE: THE NEW MUSICAL VIDEO CONTEST, THE “OLGA BRUNNER LEVI” PRIZE, THE COMPETITION RESERVED TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS, THE VIDEO CONTEST PASINETTI, THE VIDEO-OKE…

VENICE, MARCH 2nd, 2017. The 7th edition of the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival is coming. From the 15th to the 18th of March, the festival will enliven the wonderful Auditorium Santa Margherita, in the heart of Venice historic centre, where the thirty short movies of the International Competition by students of film schools and universities around the world will compete, along with special programs, tributes and masterclasses of captivating interest.

The Festival, realized with the collaboration of the Fondazione di Venezia, is the first in Europe fully conceived, organized and managed by a university and it’s loyal to its mission of being an event imagined by young people for young people: they are the main character of this event, on both the sides of the screen. The “Short” is, indeed, made up as a professional training moment for the volunteer students of Ca’ Foscari, who provide the lifeblood of the festival proven organizational machine, guided by experienced professional figures and coordinated by artistic and organizational director, Roberta Novielli. The active role of students remains the central element of the Short’s philosophy, as they are involved in all the phases of the realization: form the catalogue to the logistic, from the press office to the subtitle, from the video makers group to the distribution. The number of participants has been growing year after year, and to those who have already taken part in it – and who keep doing it with enthusiasm – new forces are always adding.

A central moment of the event is the International Competition which keeps improving in quality year after year, and for this seventh edition it counted over 1.300 works from all over the world admissible to the selection (with more than 2.000 not suitable). The Short confirms itself once more as one of the most important showcases in Italy for all the young directors who are attending or have just graduated from the most prestigious film schools and universities of the world. The thirty selected short movies come from 29 school and represent 25 different nationalities, from Brazil to Switzerland, from South Korea to South Africa, along with three Italian short fikms, with a variety that certifies the global effort for the growth of young talents. If on the one hand it is impossible to homogeneously label representatives of cinema so far from each other, it’s equally true that from this year’s selection a special attention for twisted representation of reality, often in response to circumstances too hard to face with no means of escape, emerges. It’s a theme which has a lot of different faces, such as the one of the main character of Goldfish by Facundo Scalerandi from Argentina, who instead of explaining to his children the death of their mother builds a parallel reality of lies which are more and more difficult to sustain.
An alternative dimension is also the virtual one which can bring to the depreciation of human life and to the objectification of people, as we see in the Russian Next by Elena Brodach, or it can be represented by mental alteration like in Under the Surface You Are Never Alone by Alessandro Berellini for a Swedish school, in which the trauma for a robbery brings the terrified protagonist in a state of semi-consciousness where reality and imagination become impossible to tell apart. The reality, in the end, can be a true waking nightmare itself, like the one we see in Nocebo, by the Indian director Faraz Alam, which revolves about the ruthless revenge of a nurse against Nazi soldiers during the occupation of the Czech Republic. On the other hand, however, the Short gives space also to works that make irony their stylistic mark or comedy their genre, in countertrend with the idea of a film contest that selects only dramatic movies. In this context fits the Hungarian Sightseeing of David Borbàs in which the theft of a taxi gives start to an absurd trip from Budapest to Vienna with an unexpected partner.

The international jury, which will be called to decide the winner of the Competition and to give the Volumina Special Mention for the best art film, is made up as usual of three important personalities from the world of cinema. The French Catherine Breillat appears for the first time as an actress in Last Tango in Paris by Bertolucci and then collaborates for the scripts of works by authors like Cavani and Bellocchio. As a director, movies such as À ma sœur! and Romance (with Rocco Siffredi) have inflamed debates for the free and explicit representation of sexuality, which is a central theme also in her literary production. Another female presence and the Polish actress Malgorzata Zajaczkowska, a celebrity in her own country, where she starred for Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda, but also active in the US with the stage name of Margaret Sophie Stein, collaborating with authors like Paul Mazursky and Woody Allen (in Bullets over Broadway). Not less important is Barry Purves, one of the greatest British animators, specialized in the technique of stop-motion and nominated to an Oscar for Sceen Play; he has collaborated with its animations also to films like Mars Attacks! by Tim Burton and King Kong by Peter Jackson.
To these three personalities will the usual Special program of the jury be dedicated, a unique opportunity for the audience to meet the artists and retrace their careers through words and images. Among these, the short movie Drawn from Memory, whose screening interpreter Zajaczkowska will attend together with director Marcin Bortkiewicz, rising star of Polish cinema about to come to international prominence. The Levi Award for best soundtrack, provided by Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation, will instead be awarded by a specially selected jury: the President of the Scientific Committee of the Foundation, Luisa Zanoncelli; the internationally-renowned composer Gabriele Roberto; Roberto Calabretto, form the University of Udine. It is also worth noting the establishment of the “Pateh Sabally Award”, strongly wanted by the Festival and the Municipality of Venice and named after the boy from Gambia who tragically died in the Grand Canal on January 22. The award, which is a work of the master glassmaker Paolo Crepax, will be given to the short film of the international competition that best expresses the theme of multi-ethnicity and hospitality.

Worth of the outmost consideration is also the author of the poster for this seventh edition, Giorgio Carpinteri – at his first collaboration with the Short – who will be there to meet the audience in a long movie-interview dedicated to his art. Illustrator, cartoonist and painter, he has worked with all major Italian comics magazines, from “Il Mago” to “Linus.” His short stories later have been collected in several volumes, including Flirt and L’incontro magico. In 1983, he was on the founders of the group of artists Valvoline Motorcomics, responsible for a comic supplement on “Alter Alter”. The graphic novel of Carpinteri, Polsi Sottili, published in those years, has recently been reissued in a prestigious volume published by Coconino Press. In the following years, he has collaborated in numerous publications, including “Dolce Vita”, born from the Valvoline group. Since 1986 he is also the artistic director of television programs, as well as author of posters and advertising campaigns.

Rich and varied are also this year’s special programs: tributes, workshops and special guests. Among the jewels of the seventh edition of the Ca ‘Foscari Short Film Festival is certainly the presence of Hiroshi Takahashi, the screenwriter of the original trilogy of The Ring, the most iconic film of new J-Horror that has greatly influenced the development of the genre, also popular in Italy. Takahashi will hold a masterclass about horror films during which will also a medium-length film directed by him will be screened: Kyu shihaisha no Kyaroru, inspired by the Lovecraftian song “Carol of the Old Ones.” Takahashi also collaborates with film courses at Waseda University in Tokyo, one of the most prestigious universities in Japan, where internationally-recognized directors such as Hirokazu Koreeda and Nishikawa Miwa also teach. The Festival will show four of the best short films made by students of Waseda, in a dual program curated by Tamaki Tsuchida and Norimasa Morita and created thanks to the collaboration of the Venice International University (VIU). It ranks among the homages to film schools also the one by ECAM, historical film school in Madrid which not only raises the young Spanish filmmakers of the future but, just like the Short, promotes the short film in all its forms, for example by setting up every year the event Madrid en Corto, of which the Festival will present six works from the last three editions which stand out for the diversity of genres maintaining a high-quality standard.

The monographic focus of this this year is curated by Cecilia Cossio and is dedicated to the young Indian director Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, one of the greatest directors in Marathi language. He graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) of Pune, with a short movie presented at the Short Film Festival in 2015 on the occasion of the program dedicated to this fundamental school of Indian cinema. The festival will screen four of his short films, all of them characterised by the author’s typical documentary-like precision in visually sculpting both material and psychological environments and the profound sensitivity in delineating characters and situations through sounds or their absence. Although it has now undertaken a number of feature films (the latest, Highway, 2015), Kulkarni never forgot his love for short movies and annually holds “Shoot in Short!”, a workshop on short film as an independent form of narrative.

A tribute will then be made to the Japanese artist Iimen Masako, one of the most globally-renowned sand artist, a special technique that allows her to create real stories with her hands by modelling the sand with the stop-motion technique on a glass table. As animator, Iimen has also collaborated with the “god of manga” Osamu Tezuka, who described her works as being “full of love”. The program will trace back her career, starting from the first experiments with sand animation until her most acclaimed international performances. Among her works, the most famous in Italy is probably the ending theme of Orange Road. Iimen will also be the star of the Closing Ceremony when she will delight the audience of the Auditorium with a stunning live performance of sand animation, for a show of great visual impact.

Historical partner of the Short, to which a special mention is reserved since the first edition of 2011, Volumina is a publishing house in Turin of absolute value that stands out in the Italian and international scene. With honorary president Peter Greenaway and the contribution of directors like David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, Volumina realizes art-book dedicated to cinema. These artbooks are conceived as real objects of art that are just as close to the nature of the authors to whom they are dedicated and that often accompany their exhibitions, performances or installations. On the stage of the Auditorium, artistic director Domenico De Gaetano will present Volumina to the audience, together with a preview of the backstage of Ripopolare la Regia (Peopling the Palaces), the multimedia installation by Peter Greenaway in 2007 for the inauguration of the Palace of Venaria Reale, to be released on DVD in September.

The look to the past for this year’s edition will cover two fascinating but poorly explored realities to be exceptionally rediscovered on the screen of the Auditorium. Particular attention will be granted to the ealierst commercials, evergreen form of expression that can reveal the creativity and inventiveness of emerging authors and that, in its more “authorial examples” (think of the recent cases of Sorrentino and Wes Anderson), is perfectly similar to short films. A special program called Desiderio in movimento (Desire on the Move), edited by cinema historian Carlo Montanaro in collaboration with the La fabbrica del vedere, will let the audience explore the earliest forms of commercials, from the end of the XIX century to the Thirties through a selection of rare archival footage, revealing the foundations and connections with early cinema. Once upon a time … Switzerland is the second program, curated by Massimiliano Maltoni, which renews the collaboration with the Swiss Consulate in Venice and the Cinémathèque Suisse, which focuses instead on Swiss cinema of origins, in order to bring to light materials of the early last century, ranging from a fun “riddle film” whose protagonist, William Tell, is the quintessential Swiss hero presented during the Universal Exposition of 1896 in Geneva, to a classic example of a newsreel of the twenties.

The Festival happily renews its most beloved appointments at the Short, starting with The Suspended Glance, a program by Elisabetta Di Sopra in collaboration with Visualcontainer, which will offer the public a selection of Italian video-art of the last two years that embraces the most extreme experimentation linked to synthetic digital scenarios, until the return to narrative and classic experiment. David Giurlando is also back with Anymation, the workshop dedicated to the animated film, which this year focuses on “the animation and the strain of modern life”, with the excerpts from works by Bozzetto, the school of Zagreb, up to the latest Wreck-It Ralph and Logorama. As usual, the Festival will screen the short film realized as a final trial by the students of the Ca’ Foscari Digital Cinema Course, organised by the same coordinators of the Short, who, along with many other professionals, have guided the young filmmakers through in all the stages of the work, this year a free adaptation of “I giorni perduti” (Lost days), a story by Dino Buzzati.

Along with the International Competition, will be the last edition of the Veneto High Schools’ Contest, dedicated to works by students of high schools in the Veneto region that, given the success in the past years, from 2018 it will be extended to high schools around the world. In the same occasion, the Short Film Festival began to collaborate with the Roman festival Quindici19, dedicated to this age group, with the screening of the winner of the last edition. Dedicated to high school students is also the fourth “Olga Brunner Levi” Prize, in collaboration with the Ugo and Olga Levi Foundation, a contest of videos by female students or, more generally, focus on the theme of “women in music” in all its variants. Among the news of this seventh edition there is the establishment of the first Music Video Competition, a competition only for music videos made by students of universities and film schools around the world. The contest, whose finalists will be screened, is curated by Giovanni Bedeschi. Finally, the space dedicated to a historical partner of the Short, the Pasinetti VideoContest, will present the winning works of the 2016 edition, as well as Video-oke!, a funny variant of karaoke in which players have to try to dub famous dialogues from movies.