INTERNATIONAL JURY

MIGLIOR FILM

Adieu Sauvage, Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento

In this impressive debut documentary film, the director invites the audience to journey into his identity, his “self” with him, to ask the fundamental questions of belonging, origins, sentiment – and to challenge the notion that only words can define emotion, cosmopolitanism, civilization. In this profound film, Adieu Savage addresses the complexities of decolonization and the need to embrace and transform culture on myriad levels of the individual, the people, the peoples.

MIGLIOR CORTOMETRAGGIO

Silence of the Banana Trees, Eneos Çarka

In twenty-four minutes, Silence of the Banana Trees tells the story of a whole life, the narrative of a father and a daughter coming to terms with who they are and what they mean to one another.  And in just a few short moments, this film communicates the very human need for lost and foundness.

MIGLIOR FOTOGRAFIA

Kenya, Gisela Delgadillo

Without objectification, the camera lens allows the protagonists to speak for themselves, to voice their own existences.  At a time when trans lives are endangered, the photographic choices of Kenya ensure that these people may insist on their excruciating humanness.

MIGLIOR REGIA

N’en parlons plus, Cécile Khindria e Vittorio Moroni

In their fluid storytelling, directors Cécile Khindria and Vittorio Moroni demonstrate the tensions between telling a story and lensing a history, between seamlessly blending archival artifact and narrative. Through their directorial decisions, they curate for the audience the complexity and complicity of this still unspoken moment of national memory and the very vivid consequences of this silence.

MIGLIOR MONTAGGIO

Dear Odesa, Kyrylo Naumko

Dear Odesa clearly shows how deliberate and thoughtful editing creates a deeply profound experience for viewers, selecting voices, moments, texts, and vision.  In this film on the violence of war and separation, the editing reveals how cinema, in sound and scene, can portray the silences and gaps in human tragedy.

MIGLIOR SUONO E COLONNA SONORA

Stories from the sea, Jola Wieczorek

With the most delicate refinement, Stories from the Sea balances noise, sound, music, ambience and challenges the listener to see the sea itself as a character in the film. The sound and soundtrack feature the beautiful pas-de-deux between wind and water, woman and ship, nature and humanity.

DOC FOR FUTURE AWARD

Enel Green Power gives the Award Doc for Future to Fragments from Heaven by Adnane Baraka for the ability to tell about the environment,conceived as humanity, earth and  sky as a whole. In this way it is possible to overcome the vision by which the human being put himself at the centre and subjects the nature to his service. Moreover, the film shows the possibility of a dialogue and of a meeting between ancestral and scientific knowledge, a dialogue that has always been crucial,even more today when also fake news silence human exchange. 

FILM FOR OUR FUTURE AWARD

Claw Machine by Georges Salameh. The elements that compose the story are perfectly integrated with each other giving the audience the possibility to immerse and identify themselves with one of the most current and urgent themes of contemporary history: migration flows in the Mediterranean Sea. The cold and stylized black and white animations, the trembling and ruinous narrating voice and the metal and pressing soundtrack create a wonderful and perturbant poetic documentary. Thanks to this the audience are able to identify themselves with the loneliness and distress of those who tell the story.
Claw Machine is a project that has the power to transform the universal theme of migration and war into an intimate and personal tale that is capable of shaking, questioning and enriching the audience.

STUDENTS JURY

Best Feature Film
The Student Jury unanimously recognises Kenya by Gisela Delgadillo as the best feature film for its great social commitment in telling a story too often ignored and forgotten by society. It is a story that involves and excites us, not only because of the skill with which it is told, but also because it concerns us closely. Kenya’s story is in fact the story of all the marginalised human beings who live beside us, but who do not live like us. People who suffer day after day but who do not resign and try to fight to be recognised as human beings. The decision to award Kenya the Students’ Jury Award is therefore based on our great desire to see something change, on an appeal not to ignore these stories, to try to do better as citizens and as students, in documenting these stories, to stand up against all forms of injustice. Because this story is also the story of all sex workers in our city and beyond.

Special mention
The Student Jury also unanimously awarded a special mention to Adieu Sauvage by Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento, for his commitment to documenting a form of marginalisation, perhaps far away from us, but no less important, namely the exclusion suffered by the indigenous peoples of Colombia. The Jury particularly appreciated the decision to render in black and white an environment as rich in colour as the Amazon rainforest, a choice that highlights the director’s intention to focus on the inner dimension of the individuals, with whom he enters into relationship, and with that of nature itself. The film is also a form of denunciation that goes beyond politics, and provokes philosophical and anthropological reflection. 

GIURIA NUOVI ITALIANI

The New Italians Jury, after lively discussion, unanimously recognizes as best short film The SilentProtest: 1929 Jerusalem by Mahasen Nasser Eldin. The documentary does not merely recount a historical fact but enters social dynamics and shows them in all their complexity. The title itself turns silence into protest: the account of Palestinian women and the early feminist movement in Jerusalem is told with clarity and limpid knowledge of the facts. Every technical aspect is in the service of a lucid narrative, and every frame pushes the viewer toward sincere and sudden reflection. The SilentProtest: 1929 Jerusalem uses history to understand the present and imagine the future. A silent stand, a protest against the British High Commission’s prejudice against Arabs in the Buraq uprising. It is conscience that wins along with The Silent Protest: 1929 Jerusalem.

The New Italians Jury also recognizes a Special Mention to Serigne, by Rodrigo Hernández, Adriana Cardoso, Edu Marin, for showing the side of a politics made up of ideas, social struggles, openings, closures to be faced. Serigne shows the courage of change, the hope for a better future. It does so by telling Serigne’s story, showing his life, even his private life. It renders naked a struggle that is faced every day and this is the strength of the documentary, which is necessary and always relevant.

SOLE LUNA UN PONTE TRA LE CULTURE AWARD

Sole Luna un ponte tra le culture awards Vento Na Fronteira by Laura Faerman and Marina Weis because it brings to our attention a  very current issue with strength and determination: the struggle that indigenous people of Latin America have been fighting for decades. The recognition of their rights for the territories from which they have been dispossessed over the centuries, the last bulwark against the devastation caused by agribusiness.
Through the case of the Guarani-Kaiowa of Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil, exemplary of many other similar situations, the work of the filmmakers delivers a fundamental lesson: the importance of telling stories to build bridges between generations, the profound connection between human beings and the Earth, the fact that the Earth belongs to those who care for it.

CINEMATOGRAPHE.IT AWARD
fuori concorso / Sicilia DOC

For the personal and evocative way of portraying death as part of life. Fino alla Fine reestablishes the importance of the farewell ritual, a gesture of love toward loved ones, toward those who remain. Beatrice Perego with Fino alla Fine elaborates a heartbreaking mourning, a way of celebrating her father, who passed away during the most dramatic phase of the pandemic and who, quoting the author, “lived to learn how to die” and whose fate unfortunately wanted him to leave his loved ones, passing on.

AUDIENCE AWARD

Claw machine, Georges Salameh