A short film about the life of the immobilized but memorable Joë Bousquet, a French poet reduced to a living corpse by a wound caused by a German howitzer during WWI. In 140 seconds, we go back on the last hours of his life, in the lonely darkness of his room, amid clouds of opium smoke. Through writing, Joë Bousquet expressed the inner world of a figure suspended between life and death. With this animated short film, I have tried to pay homage to him by making him resurface from the silence and shadows of his room.
BEST IN SHORTS has now reached its 9th edition at the Pesaro Film Festival. The noncompetitive section is dedicated to inventive, moving works made by Italian animation filmmakers over the past few months: “Contemporary Italian Animation”, literally. There is a really substantial number of BEST IN SHORTS this year (including very short ones), something which proves there is a very wide, and high-quality, offer.
There are mainly works made by young and very young filmmakers, very capable beginners, who are being trained in animation film at Schools, Institutes, and Fine Arts Academies. The selection also includes the latest, qualified productions of some wellknown filmmakers – whose award-winning work has already circulated abroad – with whom the Festival has a special connection: Michele Bernardi and Donato Sansone, friends of our Festival who had each a dedicated complete retrospective and a meeting. All the creators selected work like artisans, for many months, even years (except Donato Sansone who is very fast), in order to express themselves and present films of great imagination and originality, usually at festivals. These works are extremely diverse in terms of language, style, and techniques, which include hand drawing and stop motion. We believe all of them give the idea of the level of vitality, creativity, innovation, and research that many filmmakers in our country are able to express in spite of the lack of means and the scant attention received by the Italian establishment. In fact, the latter is particularly tight-fisted as regards the circulation of original works including in the audiovisual field (why doesn’t at least one of the public digital terrestrial television stations broadcast art-house animation shorts?) We would like to be able to contribute to the circulation of our filmmakers’ works as we did in the past. We wish we could start working together in this direction, so that audiences see extraordinary works that otherwise risk falling into oblivion. BEST IN SHORTS – Contemporary Italian Animation was made possible this year thanks to the fundamental partnerships with the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche in Urbino (with the animation courses conducted by Mara Cerri, Magda Guidi, and Massimo Salvucci), the Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts, and Liceo artistico – Scuola del Libro in Urbino.
ALL SCREENINGS ARE FREE
