WHEN MARY PICKFORD AND DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS VISITED GENEVA TO DISCOVER THE SWISS CINEMA SINCE ITS ORIGINS
IN THE MAZES OF THE MIND OF THE FIRST SHORT FILM TO COMPETE, THE SWEDISH-ITALIAN COLLABORATION UNDER THE SURFACE YOU ARE NEVER ALONE
During the first day there will also be: the finalists of the first Music Video Competition, the special program dedicated to Indian director Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni, the short films by the students of Waseda University of Tokyo and the one by the students of the Digital Cinema Contest of Ca’ Foscari
Tomorrow at 5.30 PM, the dean of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Michele Bugliesi together with the artistic and managing director of the Festival Roberta Novielli will formally open the seventh edition of Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival which will perform from 15 to 18 March at the Auditorium Santa Margherita. This edition is expected to be rich of extraordinary showings and international guests.
With “Once upon a time…Switzerland” (at 4.30 PM), a program edited by Massimiliano Maltoni in partnership with the Cinémathèque Suisse and the Consulate of Switzerland in Venice, the Alps will be overcome, in order to come back of over one century and discover the origins of the Swiss cinema. The very precious work of conservation of the cultural heritage and of the historical recollections of the country, stands in the centre of the kinematics project: urban stories, poetic landscapes, folklore and hard work of industries are all gloomy but historical proves that create an effect of “estrangement” in the final spectator.
Afterwards, incursions in the high society – such as the visit in Geneve- couldn’t be missed during the honeymoon through Europe of two Hollywoodian celebrities: Mary Pickford (the “American sweetheart”) and Douglas Fairbanks. Moreover, we will see the amusing cinematographic “riddle” that has as protagonist one of the Swiss heroes par excellence, Guglielmo Tell.
The International Contest will start tomorrow at 8 PM with the first six of the thirty short films from 29 different schools of cinema that belong to 25 different countries, exposed to the careful grace of an international jury of great prestige constituted by Catherine Breillat, Małgorzata Zajączkowska and Barry Purves. Among the movies on show, there is also the first of three Italian directors to compete: Alessandro Berellini, representing one of the most prestigious Swedish schools of cinema with his psychologic horror, Under the surface you are never alone,. His short film recalls a kind of suggestive horror, based on dark ambience and constant tension, which plays together with the transient psychological condition of the main character, a mother traumatised by a robbery that remains alone in her house with her own daughter. The representation of disturbed realities is one of the main recurring features among the short films of this year’s competition. For instance, Goldfish, contrived in a German school of cinema by the Argentinian director Facundo V. Scalerandi, is based entirely on a world of lies which a father creates for his children, unable to explain them the loss of their mother. Supporting this pretence will become more and more difficult and it will have a surprising influence on the two little children.
Even Petrel, by Australian director Charles Broad, plays with the mind of its protagonist, who, closed in a service station in the middle of nowhere, has to deal with the spectre of his past that assume shapes each time more real. A reality that everyone would like not to be real is the one in Nocebo from the Indian director Faraz Alam. This short film is based on a true story: indeed, it is the violent telling in black and white of a cruel revenge of a Polish nurse, victim of a group violence inflicted by Nazis soldiers during the Second World War. Clara’s Rage of Michelle Garza Cervera shares with the last short film described a female heroine, who, going against the social conventions, becomes the portrait of the condition of the woman in Mexico, through an allegorical parable where the “anger” transmitted by the strayed dogs becomes the event that causes the reaction of the protagonist. The atmosphere is decisively milder in the Russian animation Hamlet Comedy of Eugeniy Fadaye. It has been realised using a minimalistic style, where we see black silhouettes on a white background. Through the sense of humour and, at the same time, savagery, this work talks about a trip among classmates who are vivaciously going to the theatre.
Even though it is only the first day of the Festival, some awards will be assigned. For example, the first edition of the “Music Video Competition” (at 2.30 PM), a contest organised by Andrea Badeschi and dedicated to music videos realised by cinema school and university students from all around the world. Three out of the six finalists are from German institutes: Clean up by Lisa Zielke is a fantastic story about integration; Crossing the Bridge by Anatol Schister poetically combines dance with the last moments of a youngster; in Reanimation by Marcus Hanisch a funny dancing robot brings back to life some wild dancers from the Seventies. In addition to these, Voice I Am, a strong critic towards gender discriminations in Eastern countries, shot by the Iranian director Elia Sadeqi; the animation Melancholy by the Belgian director Jacinthe Folon and the last one, Olympia, shot by a couple of Italian directors, Valentina Zanrosso and Chiara Missaggia, who use the screen as a metaphor of life. The winner of the music competition is going to take part to some events and promotions sponsored by the festival media partner “Good Short Film”.
One of the monographic focuses of this year’s edition is dedicated to the Indian director Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni and edited by Cecilia Cossio (at 3.30 PM), one of the most important author in Marathi, spoken in the central-Western regions of India. Kulkarni, who graduated in the prestigious FTII of Pube (already part of a retrospective in 2015), has fast become one of the most promising film-makers in this region, arriving to shoot in less than 10 years four full-length films. However, as the workshop “Shoot a Short!” organised by him shows, the short film is his privileged artistic format. The four works which will be screened during the Festival reveal the founding aspects of his poetic: a documentarist precision in the visual description of environments and a deep sensitivity in the characters’ outline. Darshan is a spiritual parabola in the form of a long wait which divides the meeting between a child and a divinity. Gaarud consists of a long sequence that gives back with precision the various humanity that lives in a crumbling popular apartment block. Finally, Vilay is about personal loss in which the decadence of traditions of an entire nation is revealed.
Tomorrow there will be, as a tribute to the institutes that contribute to train young filmmakers, the one dedicated to the Waseda University of Tokyo (at 6 PM.), a project realised in collaboration with the Venice International University (VIU). Even if this prestigious university does not indeed have an actual film school in its courses of study, it has trained over a third of the filmmakers who are figure between Japanese film-makers and almost half of the screenwriters, thanks to the cooperation between different departments and also excellent alumni, such as Hirokazu Koreeda. The selection that will be presented at the Short, curated by Tamaki Tsuchida and Norimasa Morita, is also coloured in pink, as four short films by five young female student at Waseda University will be shown. They all have in common the theme of the night and an imaginary element, starting from The Night of Baku, by Mami Hashimoto, which is about an unusual meeting between a man and a “nightmare’s monster”, to continue with The Last Dream, by Noemie Nakai and Carmen Kobayashi, a futuristic story about a society that is no longer able to dream. Instead, Starry Night, by Mio Hoshiai, is a consideration about the unbalanced relation between tradition and innovation and it is written as an allegorical parable; whereas Every Night, by Aya Miyazaki, is an imaginary story about the emancipation of an oppressed woman.
The festival is particularly proud of the short films’ presentation realised by the students of the Digital Cinema Course of Ca’ Foscari (at 2 PM), a course that was launched in 2013 and that was organised by the same coordinators of the Short. The students have been assisted by experts of cinema world. Thanks to their help, the students realised together a short film as a “saggio di laurea”, handling every phase of his realisation, from the subject to the post-production. The result is I giorni perduti, a work based on the self-titled short story of Dino Buzzati, freely adapted and re-interpreted in the tone of the black and grotesque comedy.
