Presentation

The road to a film festival? Never one-way, never with no entry to non-cinephiles. So, in which direction can/should a small/big film festival go from now on, while uncertainties and pandemic limitations and changes in the cultural consumption of stories and images affect projects, meetings, choices, analysis?
The Trieste ShorTS International Film Festival proposes for itself, for professionals/staff, media and viewers, a circular polyhedral direction but without all-consuming binging from an overflowing container. A pragmatic and divining direction that exposes the present and looks for new indications, a direction whereby its engrained history sees the gradual moving forwards of stories and people, hopefully increasingly less dependent on the risks to the well-being of the planet. In short, the direction of a festival/roundabout with themed entries/exits that also dare to bypass the main road of cinema tout court, to then return to more… local roads.

ShorTS IFFnow offers and will offer many award-winning shorts from all over the world, an annual focus on shorts from countries beyond the Adriatic and Aegean seas, very young selectors and first users/judges of stories for preteens and young high school students, workshops to help young creators present their shorts projects in the best possible way in the workshop and festival circuits, heterogeneous international feature films, also midway between fiction and realism, inventive cartoonists to stimulate creativity during a group marathon, 360° visual immersions in the context of virtual reality, collectivisation of each spectator alone with ‘their’ story but a metre away from other… solitudes. Awards for Italian filmmakers and actors (for the time being…) emerging from the present, full of the past, ready for the future, not ephemeral or showcase awards but those with an intelligent and popular impact and identifying each year other segments of the cinema machine (links with ethnic and culinary anthropology, musical history, links with the city and regional area which has produced a great deal of wide-ranging cinema in recent years and a revival of city venues designated to host screenings, meetings, conversations).

Each year’s festival has its own pleasing harvest after sowing its seeds, its own calibre of validations and surprises, discoveries and reflections, with its (natural for Trieste and surrounding area) route as a solid cultural and entertainment crossroads.

Because amidst so much uncertainty about current and future rights and duties for us citizens, and after semi-isolation and social restrictions, the directional and intimate meaning of a festival such as the Trieste ShorTS IFF will remain a meaning sensitive to the terrain of the area in which a satellite dish has been set up for 22 years to intercept and decrypt signals from the world, not just of cinema…

Maurizio di Rienzo