The winners of the 20th edition of ShorTS International Film Festival

The 20th edition of the ShorTS International Film Festival ended on Saturday 6th July with the award ceremony in Piazza Verdi at 8.00 pm. The Trieste event has announced the 2019 winners of the various competitive sections, confirming its commitment to finding new cinematic landscapes.

Here are the comments from the director Chiara Valenti Omero and the co-director Maurizio di Rienzo:

“After 20 years of screenings, discoveries and research, ShorTS wanted to confirm with this important edition its diverse vocation and attention to new horizons on the reality of the world through exciting short films, feature films and documentaries, as well as immersive journeys in Virtual Reality, screenings dedicated to children and adolescents and meetings with authors, producers and filmmakers. It gives us pleasure and honour that the Trieste public (and the wider world) has followed and appreciated this articulated 9-day program of unique images and dialogues with the protagonists. Our intention is to give space to all the different ways of making films in the world today, just as we seem to be surrounded by ordinary audiences with videos, stories and media on which to see them. Therefore ShorTS, eager to anticipate new eras of cinema, will try with passion and critical spirit to continue its “elusive” side in the coming years.”

The winners of the 20th edition of ShorTS International Film Festival

MAREMETRAGGIO SECTION
(Jury composed of Álvaro Gago Díaz, Heinz Hermanns, Hrönn Marinósdóttir, Pippo Mezzapesa and Fabio Omero)

EstEnergy Award – Hera Group

Best short film:
“All inclusive” by Corina Schwingruber Ilić
Reason: “Accurate, touching, all-encompassing. A compelling narrative that reveals the emptiness of the entertainment industry staged aboard a cruise ship, inviting us all to look in the mirror, to laugh, and to use this laugh to change the ship’s course. ”

Special mention to:
“Inanimate” by Lucia Bulgheroni
Motivation: “This intelligent and original animation shows us the daily life of a woman. Through the use of extraordinary images and surprising twists it connects different levels of life and reality. ”

AcegasApsAmga Award

Best Italian short film:
“My Tyson” by Claudio Casale
Reason: “We particularly appreciated the application of the short film tools to the contents of the documentary film. The result is a work that at the same time tells a human story and investigates a social phenomenon (the integration of second generations), gravitating attention to the emotional impact of overlapping languages ​​and to minute details that, together, restore complexity of a fresco of life. ”

Premiere Film Award
Best short film not distributed:
“Raymonde or the Vertical escape” by Sarah Van den Boom
Reason: “For the ability to build a world suspended between fairy-tale elements and the contemporary, in which the protagonist, after a life of solitude, finds the strength to question her choices and to act to satisfy her desire of love, of sex, of life. ”

Oltre il Muro Award

Best Italian short film voted by the inmates of Trieste Prison:
“Bautismo” by Mauro Vecchi
Reason: “The short film represents with strength and lucidity an increasingly topical subject: that of petty crime, youth gangs and bullying that is raging in large urban areas. In this case the metropolis is Milan. Outlining a character, one of these boys in disarray but outside of criminal and indeed very sensitive and delicate contexts, the author succeeds in resurrecting that violence of an almost ancestral rituality that has always been the depersonalisation of the individual, one of the prices to pay to become part of the “social contract” of a group or clan (not necessarily criminals) where you live or survive. ”

Special mention to:
“Così in terra” by Pier Lorenzo Pisano
Motivation: “For having deeply grasped the inexplicable mystery of life that no one, not even the “experts” in togas or those in white collars, knows how to answer. The only solution remains to help and compare those who live in great inner suffering, moral and even physical, depending on their nature and role which in their turn destiny or god has bestowed on us. ”

Trieste Caffè Award
Best short film voted by the public:
“Pepitas” by Alessandro Sampaoli and “Fino alla fine” by Giovanni Dota

AMC Award
Best Italian editing:
“My Tyson” by Claudio Casale
Reason: “For the use of dialectical editing as an element of narrative dynamics. As the mother sews clothes so the assembly weaves moments of life of the two protagonists. Mother and child unite, images and sounds intertwine developing their history in the present to detect the conditions determined in the past, and indicating a future already existing in our reality: the inevitability of a possible freedom, always.

Special mention to:
“Freddo dentro” by Valerio Burli
Reason: “The special mention goes to a short film that in the fusion of imagination and reality metaphorically represents the generational confrontation. The narrative timing of the montage describes, on the one hand, the human condition of addiction to horror and the inability to oppose it together in searching for an embrace, an impossible spark of humanity; on the other hand, as a last path for the new generations, the dive into a foggy elsewhere in search of a concrete possibility.”

Leonardo Da Vinci Award
Best Italian Cinematography:
“The Shadow of the Bride” by Alessandra Pescetta
Reason: “The Sicilian sea welcomed and never returned the bodies of thousands of children who died during the Second World War. The dead on one side and on the other the opposing armies and nations, but they all found themselves at the bottom of the sea. Bodies that in the tight cuts of the shots fluctuate through the water, together with the memories and the connections left and now broken – the photo of the lover, love letters, the wedding ring -, bodies that not even in the depth of that sea can find peace. Alessandra Pescetta paints these bodies with the raw light that filters through the water, the leaden colours and the final gestures that seek a contact again with those who in that same water have lost all hope of once again embracing them. And as in Leonardo, also in “L ‘shadow of the bride’, it is the affections that draw the story between men and to talk about them still holds power. It is in fact the story of a tragic journey, which transforms the dream of a future life into the drama of those who will not even have a wooden coffin and a piece of land in which to be buried. A tragic journey, which still continues to repeat itself in that stretch of sea. ”

SHORTS VIRTUAL REALITY SECTION
(Jury composed of Antonio Giacomin, Gabriella Giliberti and Stefano Seriani)

EstEnergy Award – Hera Group

Best VR short film:
“Tower of Babel by the sea” by Feng Wei-Jung
Reason: “Tower of Babel by the Sea is an immersive journey, achieved through the use of virtual reality and, therefore, the subjectivity of the viewer, which allows us to explore new narrative perspectives that have their roots in the tragic reality of an ever growing world adrift. A mythological re-elaboration that faces us with a passive, narrow and disturbing struggle, and makes us reflect on how much man hides behind the concept of an “evil deity”; the film brings to light his tragic delirium of omnipotence, of vice and pride that makes him a victim of himself. A complex technical and narrative work, with an important, accurate, chilling and shocking metaphorical value, where the use of virtual reality amplifies the sense of powerlessness and drama of events, profoundly tarnishing the soul of the viewer.”

Special mention to:
“Borderline” by Assaf Machnes
Reason: “A reflection on the physical and conceptual sense of the border, on the exploration of it and on the lability of the term in front of the vastness of a deserted land. A film that pushes us to go beyond the idea of ​​the border itself with the use of virtual reality, spurring the viewer to cross any “line”, discovering, exploring with the look and actions. An extract of reality constructed with a dramatic structure at par with a thriller, where suspense grows and the climax is almost exasperated, leading to desperately wanting to interact with the drama of the events, until reaching an unexpected final that makes the narrative itself , as current as it is unique. A task – in the light of what we are experiencing – that cannot be but remembered and, therefore, rewarded.”

RAI Cinema Channel Award
Best VR short film:
Ex aequo “Metro veinte: cita ciega” by María Belén Poncio and “Borderline” by Assaf Machnes

Reason for “Metro veinte”: “To have wisely exploited the potential of VR technology and to have put it in support of a story that defies courage but at the same time delicately taboos about sexuality and disability.”

Reason for “Borderline”: “For the ability to immerse the viewer into the virtual experience, bringing it effectively into the narrative, capturing our attention to the end and allowing him to experience the emotions and uncertainties of the protagonists.”

Il Piccolo Award
Best VR short film voted by the public:
“Borderline” by Assaf Machnes

NUOVE IMRPONTE SECTION
(Jury composed of Alessio Cremonini, Elena Cucci, Gianluca Guzzo, Vinicio Marchioni and Sara Serraiocco)

Crédit Agricole FriulAdria Award
Best feature film:
“Selfie” by Agostino Ferrente
Reason: “For the ability to make us question the ethical and aesthetic mechanisms of representation, in an age in which everyone becomes the director of themselves and yet never ceases to be the object of the gaze. For the authenticity of the story personally managed by the protagonists and the uneducated truth of their gaze. For the honesty in declaring, however, that the presence of a director in some way also shapes the self-managed representation. And because this film changes the way we interpret the narrative and representational possibilities of Italian cinema, leaving a profound imprint that from now on will be impossible to ignore.”

MYmovies Award
Best feature film voted by the public “Beautiful Things” by Giorgio Ferrero and Federico Biasin

AGICI Award
Best production: “Selfie” by Agostino Ferrente
Reason: “It is strange to give the prize to the best producer / production where a production seems to be almost non-existent. This documentary film goes beyond cinematic veracity and enters the mirror of truth, in the representation of the same by the protagonists. The extraordinary work of the screenwriter, director and producers is to put his strength and skills at the service of the unpredictable path of those who tell themselves. They won the award for Best Production, Casa delle Visioni and Magnèto Productions for having been able to support the extreme concept of Agostino Ferrente in a production process that brought to the Film the support of precious institutions such as the Istituto Luce and the French CNC as well as two large European cultural companies: Rai Cinema and ARTE France. Selfie is a difficult film to produce precisely because of its deliberately anarchic construction, which thanks to certainly tenacious producers has given all its spectators unique moments of cinema. ”

SNCCI Award
Best feature film voted by the jury of the Italian Film Critics Union: “The World is flat” by Matteo Carrega Bertolini
Reason: “To look for one’s place in the world between needs and desires, fears and frustrations, without losing oneself. “The World is flat” shows how the encounter with the other is the best compass when the Earth seems to flatten out. We reward the film, therefore, for its ability to tell in a non-trivial way bodies and spaces, looks and gestures, to find authentic images even within a tradition of independent cinema, through a conscious aesthetic “.

ANAC Award
Best screenplay: “Selfie” by Agostino Ferrente
Reason: “An innovative, rigorous writing. The portrait, or rather self-portrait, of the two protagonists Alessandro and Pietro, both sixteen and resident in the Trajan district of Naples, is touching and detached at the same time. The stylistic choice of the “selfie”, a risky and reckless road, was pursued with great consistency and awareness. The lucid determination with which a writing that made use of the technique of empathy was discarded, thus avoiding transforming the two protagonist boys into “cool anti-heroes”, in the style of many TV series. Ultimately, an innovative writing for an equally innovative film, whose “frontal” frames suggest the shots of the first two films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Accattone” and “Mamma Roma”. As we know, for the great Friulian poet “frontality is sacredness”.

SHORTER KIDS’N TEENS SECTION

Shorter Kids Award
Best Kids short film:
“Becolored” by Maurizio Forestieri

Public Shorter Kids Award
Best Kids short film voted by the public:
“Becolored” by Maurizio Forestieri

Shorter Teens Award
Best short Teens:
“Me first” by Aggelos Tzogou, Diamantis Pachis, Giorgos Foskolos, Nikos Skiathitis, Panagiotis Fouscarinis, Ioanna Foskolou, Ioanna Tsarpala

Public Shorter Teens Award
Best Teens short film voted by the public:
“Golden Girl” by Chiara Fleischhacker

Cinema Award of the Present
Alessio Cremonini

Prospettiva Award
Francesco Di Napoli