Presentation of the opening trailer and the book “P.”

Roberto Catani (Jesi, 1965) is one of the leading !gures in Italian animation !lmmak-ing, working as an animator, illustrator, and director. He graduated in art of cartoon-ing from the “Scuola del Libro” State Art Institute in Urbino. Since 1995, he has created several animated short !lms, including Il pesce rosso, La sagra, La funambola, La testa tra le nuvole, Per tutta la vita, and Il burattino e la balena. Catani’s !lms have been selected and awarded at major international animation festivals, including An-necy, Hiroshima, Zagreb, Ottawa, and Animateka and received a nomination at Car-toon d’Or and Nastri d’Argento awards. His drawings and !lms have been presented at the Lincoln Center in New York, the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Turin, and ARTECIN-EMA in Naples among others. 

by Roberto Catani

sound design: Riccardo Mancini
post-production: Mariangela Malvaso

“The idea for the animated opening theme, made of nearly 320 drawings on paper coloured in with chalk, pastels, and oilbars, was conceived as a way to play with cin-ema and iconic sequences of the seventh art. The game involved searching for con-nections and narrative matching shots within scenes of the !lms, breaking down and recomposing the sequences, as well as reworking the shapes of the characters, trans-forming and reinventing them. The !nal result is a mosaic of images that refer to !lm sequences which are not immediately recognisable; however, viewers can tap into their imagination to put the images back into context. The !rst scene of the opening theme, which was also used for the poster, does not refer to any !lms from the history of cin-ema, either old or recent, but acts as a symbolic highlight for the place where the Fes-tival takes place. The bicycle, a ubiquitous vehicle and object throughout Pesaro, is the narrative device that formally joins the early sequences of the animated !lm together.” (Roberto Catani)