ShorTS Is In the Air

The artwork for the 25th ShorTS IFF, the event held in Trieste from Friday 28 June to Saturday 6 July, plays on the multiple cinematographic moods that characterise its process of exploration within the diverse world of short films and beyond.

Over nine days of programming, the Festival is to offer a wide-ranging overview of the vitality of this idiom made up of around 120 international works from the four corners of the world (America, Africa, Asia and Europe) via six competition sections – Maremetraggio, ShorTS Express, Italia in ShorTS, Eco-ShorTS, Shorter Kids’n’Teens, ShorTS Immersive. It will highlight the merits of some of the key players in feature films – Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo (Premio Cinema del Presente), Carlotta Gamba (Premio Prospettiva) and Laura Samani (Campolungo) and at the same time propose a rich calendar of side events.

ShorTS Express

The section numbers 23 short and very short cinematographic works lasting less than 5′ and divided among animation, documentary and experimentation and from 17 countries, both European and non-European, made by filmmakers who make the search for visual/narrative conciseness their clear objective, such as the multi-award-winning Spanish director David Pantaleón who presents El Naciente/Emerging, a humorous story about a brilliant Korean researcher obsessed by the idea of making a great discovery, and Monica Rattazzi, a French-Moroccan-Italian screenwriter and author making her directorial debut with Immortels, which tells the story of a protagonist’s courage in moving on after a difficult few years.

Italia in ShorTS

There are 11 works in Italia in ShorTS, a section that looks at recent Italian short film production, focusing on the most widely varying genres, forms, themes and styles of some distinct and surprising voices from Italy’s lively scene. The shorts include Una storia d’azione italiana by Tommaso Gorani from Trieste; Il corpo del mondo by Simone Massi, where medieval and religious figures – freely inspired by the 15th-century frescoes in the church of San Fiorenzo, in Bastia Mondovì – are re-imagined in a perpetual downward motion accompanied by the voice of Fabrizio Gifuni, who quotes phrases from Restoro d’Arezzo’s La composizione del mondo; Erant (a tale of legends from Valle d’Aosta) by Enrico Granzotto, based on historical sources and oral testimonies, which explores the folklore fantasies of the Valle d’Aosta, interpreting three legends handed down from the popular tradition of Valle d’Aosta in horror mode; and Hunger, the directorial debut of British-Italian Natalie Spencer, former actress, producer and curator, which transports us to the mystical realm of Mount Etna, where the law of nature is sovereign.

Eco-ShorTS

A selection of eleven short films with ten countries represented that aims to make audiences think, to put Nature (back) at the centre of human life, through films that focus on understanding, exploring, deepening man’s deep connection with it. One example is Orchard by Federico Barni, an Italian director living in London who, amidst tension and suspense, recounts how two mining experts are drawn to the subsoil and the depths of a sentient ecosystem in search of an abandoned gold mine in a Welsh forest, and Blow! by Neus Ballús, a Catalan director with already award-winning full-length documentaries to her credit, which invites us to explore the unknown and mysterious world of the whales that appear for a few weeks every year off the coast of Catalonia.