Guide to Sardinia Film Festival 2021, Luca Raffaelli’s anticipations about awards, competitors and jury.

Everything is ready, it’s the final countdown to this edition of Award Sardinia Film Festival (se viene pubblicato domani = The Sardinia Film Festival is finally here, completely dedicated to animation.

What to aspect from this week of projections and meetings?
Here’s an introduction by our art director Luca Raffaelli to get the right mood.

<<Few years ago, when I started to deal with animation in festivals (especially Lucca Comics), I knew that the programmed films couldn’t been watched in a different way. Festivals were magic places where you could discover a world of creations that normally can’t be reached.

Today it’s completely different. You can come to Sardinia Film Festival and also find many and many things. Actually, the role of festivals didn’t change at all. We can still choose, offer paths, hype the passions and create a community. These are the aims of an event such as the Sardinia Film Festival, which this year drawn its attention towards animation. A world connected to other arts like comics, videogames and many others.

Not by chance, the festival pays tribute to a great Italian Maestro, Manfredo Manfredi, who will present his last short film “Lo spirito della notte”, realized after 20 years of absence from the animation wolrd. In the meantime, Manfredo has painted made sculptures. We have an award dedicated to him and we give it for the “film that gives space to the doubt”. Because art has also this purpose to make us doubt, we need uncertainties that enrich our mindset and existence. Like Dedalo, the short film for which he was nominated to Oscar in 1976.

That nomination that also had Bruno Bozzetto (also honored by the Festival with an award in his name) and that had the great Italian animation couple formed by Giulio Gianini and Emanuele Luzzati. We dedicate the opening night to Lele: Matteo Valenti’s documentary beautifully tells what a unique person he was, his joyful art, his generosity. We dedicate another of our awards to Giugi Gianini. And then, in Matteo’s film, there is also his art.

The international competition is filled with jewelry from around the world. With many young authors and many students, in this magnificent field of experimentation which is the short film from which new styles and characters are born which then become fundamental material for the ideas of great production. This does not at all mean that, to be valid, a short film must necessarily transform itself into something else. Many of those that we will see in the days of the festival are films that live fully in their brevity, for their ability to synthesize, for the creation of a world that lives in a few minutes.

Two other guests of the festival, Nieto and Nicola Piovesan, look great in the dimension of the short. Both play on reality, modifying it, transforming it, pretending that there are other dimensions in which to go and experience our earthly and daily emotions. While there are other authors (even among those in competition) who focus their attention on reality. There is talk of war, pollution, poverty. And it is nice that a Festival like this navigates through all the stylistic and thematic varieties of our world.

There will also be two protagonists of the cartoon on the web: Cartoni Morti and Astutillo Smeriglia. And also other documentaries that tell comics artists such as Guido Crepax and Tuono Pettinato. And then there are the Sardinian dreams, because here many of them are being created around the animated cinema.

One more note on the awards that want to be different from the others and (as already mentioned) be associated with the great masters of Italian animation born in the twenties and thirties and more linked to the world of short films. The one dedicated to Fabrizio Bellocchio, is dedicated instead to an enthusiast with a too short life, but his Award (won in past years by Maurizio Forestieri and John Canemaker, a few months before his Oscar for “The Moon and The Son” and the Chinese Liu Jian, before his Asian Oscar for “Piercing I”), dedicated to the social, was already too important not to be included in our list. In past years it was won by Maurizio Forestieri, by John Canemaker, a few months before his Oscar for “The Moon and The Son” and by the Chinese Liu Jian, also before receiving the Asian Pacific Screen Award for “Piercing I”.
It is certainly a prize that brings good luck.

A final note for the jury which sees the great master of film editing Roberto Perpignani, the artist and writer Chiara Rapaccini, the director Angela Conigliaro, the comic artist and creator of the Paff as President! (Palace of Comics in Pordenone) Giulio De Vita and Damián Perea, director, producer and artistic director of the Animayo animation festival.

Lots of experience and many different visions.

P.S. A sincere thanks to the President Cristian Jezdic, to the Organizational Director Carlo Dessì and to the fantastic team of the Festival: with everyone I shared the sincere pleasure of undertaking this new, wonderful experience. >>

So, the appointment is in Sassari at Cityplex Moderno multiplex, from the 3^rd to the 8^th December. The screenings are free and you only need a GREEN PASS certificate to access.