SIFF STUDENTS AWARD

CORIANDOLI by Maddalena Stornaiuolo

Among the Vele di Scampia, an architectural project in Naples, the youth of a girl grown up too fast can be summed up in the word “lack”. Lack of toys, fairy tales, holidays, smiles and, most of all, of love but, despite this, she has managed to preserve reading as her only one refuge. This shows how culture can save someone even in the deepest darkness and proves that a better future can still be possible. The film director has been able to transmit concisely and effectively a clear, direct and necessary message.

BEST ABRUZZO SHORT FILM

THIS IS FINE by Gianmarco Nepa. He has been able to speak about the indifference towards the destruction of our planet from a different and original point of view by embedding at the same time strong and impactful images. This powerful idea was able to dig into the emotionality of the audience.

BEST ANIMATION SHORT FILM

NORMAL by Julie Caty (France). She has been able to create a hypnotic loop in an extremely funny way, a style resembling that of South Park and an interesting sense of humour belonging to our time. The approach she used, despite it not being new, perfectly combines with the type of aesthetics and story.

BEST EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM

ORTHODONTICS by Mohammadreza Mayghani (Iran), for the peculiarity of the subject and the way it is valorised by the photography and the settings. These blink the eye to the audience by meeting an aesthetics in a pop style but, at the same time, preserving its uniqueness. A work that, in its brevity, is both exhaustive and allusive since it is full of contrasts that, instead of compromising the vision, increase the curiosity.

BEST WEB / TV SERIES PILOT

#MARTYISDEAD by Pavel Soukup (Czech Republic), for having the courage to reason about the hidden dangers of adolescence and facing cyberbullying, a topic both insidious and chilling. The film director describes its tragic consequences without resorting to a sweetener to the point of making a vision sometimes repelling. It is an intriguing and solid work built with master of medium and able to capture the viewer’s attention.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM

THE QUEEN OF BASKETBALL by Ben Proudfoot (USA), for the effectively fulfilled wish to warn and incite the new generations within a didactic narration that does not give up the mainstream logics of entertainment and that aims at teaching something without traces of pedantry.

BEST NATIONAL SHORT FILM

MEMORIES OF CROSSING by Alberto Segre (Italy)

An Italian production about Romania that looks at another state from a local point of view. It is characterised by the remarkable use of narrative twist, the development and evolution of characters and tension within an amusing and substantial short film that deals with the torture of agonism and immortalizes the desire to win in the highest sense of the term. The wickedness and despair of one of the female characters in supplanting the other is effectively conveyed and the urgency of telling this story allows a total change in register at the service of storytelling.

BEST INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM

SEIVA BRUTA by Gustavo Milan (Brazil), for the completeness of the cinematographic experience characterized by strong traits of elegance and power and by impressive and structured solutions in stage directions. It transmits the sense of a dramatic poetry that does not give up irony and reaches an epic that crosses many magnetic locations and makes a deal with an idea of pure narrative and figurative beauty.

BEST MUSIC VIDEO

BACK TO US  by Gabriele Rossi (Italy), for condensing the poetics of different artists into a unique narrative flow able to exalt the peculiarity of the individual inspiration in respect of an overall view of considerable expressive caliber.

Category Awards

BEST SOUNDTRACK  (dedicated to Gabrielle Lucantonio)

Ariel Marx for SEIVA BRUTA

A music that goes hand in hand with the story. Marx chose and wrote the most adequate soundtrack in accordance with the short film keeping a certain distance from the most abused melodic traditions and preventing it to prevail in an intrusive way. At a specific time of the short film music intensifies together with a totally electronic orchestra. One gets the feeling that the overall impact of the product would be extremely depowered without the contribution of the soundtrack

BEST ACTRESS

Samantha Castillo for SEIVA BRUTA

The actress reveals a strong performance in the role of Marta, a young Venezuelan mother who meets a young couple with a baby in trouble while emigrating to Brazil. Her performance gives emotion to this character characterised by an extremely multifaceted and articulated pregnancy shown on the screen with a painful and quivering intensity.

BEST ACTOR

Günter Tolar in FABIU, for his moving performance that clarifies what is not being said on the previous life of the character. The audience doesn’t see it on the screen but is able to imagine it through the character’s erotic hesitations and desires both connected to his wife and his silenced homosexuality.

BEST EDITING

Ben Proudfoot e Stephanie Owens with THE QUEEN OF BASKETBALL for the appropriate and accurate use of editing that shows a peculiar skill in making people smile by mixing public and private without giving up emotion.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Georg Weiss in FABIU, for his remarkable management of a not easy photography within a story that is very complex on the emotional level. The lighting of physical traits and objects, from the wrinkles of the main character to the curtains, creates a visual landscape characterized by outlines, moonlight and a tendency to tone down the darkness in peculiar moments of chance. The result is an extremely sophisticated visual language starting from the choice of the camera angles and the light points.

BEST SCREENPLAY

Annie St-Pierre with LIKE THE ONES I USED TO KNOW, for the composition that shoulders the difficult challenge of rendering the sense of community and the intimacy of a family by projecting the viewer into the 1980s through the pictorial boost of a snapshot. A cinema that doesn’t belong to the present but to the past. A cinema that is able to involve and get an emotional adherence. A cinema that directly addresses every viewer by using a very particular and common milieu. A cinema that is not afraid to disseminate symbols and details.

BEST DIRECTOR

Annie St-Pierre with LIKE THE ONES I USED TO KNOW for the mastery in introducing a family in just some minutes with an enviable naturalism rendering the sense of solitude of the father and the individual identity of every kid who reached a very high acting level. The management and control of heterogeneous characters and elements, oscillating between childhood and adulthood, has been ambitiously handled striking a balance between complexity and skilful hand.