The Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival celebrates its fourteenth edition, which will take place in Venice from 20th to 23rd March.
With the coordination of the artistic and organizational director, Maria Roberta Novielli, the Short is the first European festival entirely organised by a university. All aspects of the festival- from press, to subtitles, to logistics- are organised by both students and experts. The festival will take place at various cultural sites all over Venice, with the historic Santa Margherita Auditorium – Emanuele Severino as the main location; there will be screens in museums, art galleries and other cultural institutions such as Venice City Hall’s Casa del Cinema, the National Archaeological Museum, Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation and InParadiso at the Biennale Gardens. As every year, there is a wide range of events taking place over the course of the festival, including workshops and retrospectives.
The International Competition is still the beating heart of the festival, bringing together the most promising talents of international filmmaking. Films have been submitted by students of film schools and universities from all over the world, including Sanjoli Malani from the London Film School; Malani’s short film, Chai – Coffi, follows the extraordinary adventure of Lata, a 60 year old housewife and widow, who embarks on a journey through Kerala. The film explores themes of friendship, loss, courage and self-discovery, and displays the director’s personal aim to heal the world through films. Sanjoli Malani is a filmmaker from Mumbai and a recent graduate from London Film School where she achieved a distinction in her MA in Filmmaking.
There are two other competitions running at the festival: one focused on music videos by university students and another for short films by high school students. There will also be a range of special programmes, in-depth examinations, homages, retrospectives and masterclasses– all with free entry. A particularly exciting guest at one of the special programmes this year is Joanna Quinn, an English director and animator (Girls just wanna draw: the art of Joanna Quinn). She founded her own production company, Beryl Productions, together with her partner, Les Mills and has won two Emmy awards and 4 BAFTAs. Her works are defined by nervous, dynamic sketches, with faces and distorted bodies with graphic afterthought, which she purposefully chooses not to delete, thus making the viewer a participant in the creative process. Quinn explores themes of female physicality, male chauvinism and unrealistic expectations of women through her recurring protagonist, Beryl: a nonconformist character who claims her imperfect physicality in Body Beautiful (1991), and then goes onto create through film, in Dreams & Desires – Family Ties (2006) and the Oscar-nominated, Affairs of the Art (2021). Quinn’s short, Elles (1992), was part of a series of films produced by the Musée D’Orsay, in which two Junoesque models of Toulouse Lautrec take a break from posing.
The Festival is brought to you in collaboration with Fondazione di Venezia, and the support of many partners, such as Avani Hotels, the Italian on-demand short film platform WeShort, today’s oldest prosecco production company Carpenè-Malvolti, backing from Cinit – Italian Cineforum, Municipality of Venice – Murano – Burano, National Museum of Cinema in Turin, Conservatory of Music “Arrigo Pedrollo” in Vicenza and two festivals: Giornate della Luce in Spilimbergo and the South Italy International Film Festival in Barletta.
