Venice Film Festival announces Orizzonti 2011

Following the acclaim of public and press for the 2010 selection (and the vast international distribution it later enjoyed), the program of Orizzonti 2011 is again presented as an exploration of the modes of contemporary cinema, at the point in which it intersects with other expressive languages. And this, in the year when the Visual Arts Biennale has dedicated a special space to artists who work with images in motion.
 
Festival would like to offer the viewers of the 68th Venice Film Festival a journey in the company of short, medium and feature-length films, addressing the issue of film narrative without denying its sensual or emotional dimension. Given this premise, the scope of the selection ranges from film-essays to animation, from anguished meditation to comedy, from the interaction between cinematic gesture and the visual arts to a renewed faith in the power of the fundamental syntax of cinema (if not necessarily as Griffith understood it…)
 
This is a program that features renowned masters, new discoveries and renewed acquaintances… In open dialogue with the films of the main competition, Orizzonti questions reality, forms and representations. It seeks to unbalance the status of images, it tears open perception and meaning and allows festival to perceive new directions.
 
Highlighting themes or trends will undoubtedly seem somewhat superficial. But it is worth trying to delineate some hypothetical directions:
– the convergence between visual arts and film has become so widespread as to break down the barriers between languages, as you will discover in the most recent works of Mark Lewis, Yuri Ancarani, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Devin Horan, Nicolas Provost, Flatform or Eija-Liisa Ahtila.
– the power of the framed image and the subversion of film editing are the compelling expressive tools that distinguish the films of Yves Caumon, Amir Naderi, Shinya Tsukamoto, Kim Kyungmook, Gurvinder Singh, Teresa Villaverde, Amiel Courtin-Wilson;
– the latest manifestations of the relationship with reality find different forms in Tusi Tamasese, Clarissa Campolina and Helvécio Marins Jr., Mattias Gustafsson, José Luis Torres Leiva, Mati Diop: all begin with elements of fiction that permeate the world around us; whereas Ross McElwee, Pippo Delbono, Jonathan Demme and Andrew Kötting focus on the intimate dimension of diaries (their own or those of others);
– the challenge of making films based on the documents, figures or traces of history is the point of departure for projects such as those by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi, James Franco, Heinz Emigholz, Oscar Perez and Maria Del Mar de Ribot, Felice D’Agostino and Arturo Lavorato, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Yuri Leiderman/Andrey Silvestrov and Müller/Girardet;
– the characteristic of works such as those by Xu Haofeng (martial arts), Wim Vandekeybus (the imaginary backstage of a theatre production) Marina de Van (a horror fairy tale), Charles Yi Yong Lim (a metaphysical thriller) or by Mirai Mizue, Isamu Hirabayashi and Yves Netzhammer (non-aligned animation and 3 D) is to present contemporary incarnations of film genres;
– reinventing the relationship between cinema and the literary narration (comic or dramatic), beyond the conventional forms, is the focus of experimentation by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, Mauro Andrizzi, Joseph Dabernig, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Wattanapume Laisuwanchai, Amit Dutta;
– documentary films conceived as visions of interior worlds and hidden territories, or as ways of making the world “visible”, are on offer from Romuald Karmakar, Yolande Zauberman, Simon Pummell, Michael Glawogger, Ben Russell and Ben Rivers.
 
It doesn’t matter which itinerary you choose. As you wander through the landscape of Orizzonti you could meet, who knows, a medieval knight, videogame fanatics, super intelligent robots, at least two disgraceful old ladies, along with the good-crazy-marvelous Carolyn Parker, famous men and more or less famous historical figures (the man who stole Saddam Hussein’s Ferrari!), odd scientists and sad vacationers, and so many well-intentioned or fearsome animals…