Animated Shorts Take Center Stage in Orizzonti
Despite not finding any animated works in Venice’s main competition, we find several in the Orizzonti Short Films Competition.
Sasso, carta, forbici by Virginia Mori is set in the iconic backdrop of an amusement park, which Mori describes in her notes as carrying “an ambivalent evocative power. Drawing on its symbolic potential, the film tells the story of a day among friends. The complexities of their relationships are explored somewhere between the ironic and the grotesque, through the gestures and rides the characters experience one by one, alluding to rites of passage that mark the transition into adulthood.” A nine-minute film produced by Milan-based Withstand Film and Miyu Productions — the well-known French animation house behind the feature Chicken for Linda! (Linda veut du poulet !) by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, which picked up numerous major international honors, including the 2024 César for Best Animated Film and the Cristal d’Or at Annecy in 2023. Together, the two companies had previously produced The Puppet and the Whale (Il burattino e la balena) by Roberto Catani.
One of Italy’s leading animated-short filmmakers, Simone Massi presents The Sense of Earth (Il senso della terra) out of competition in Orizzonti, alongside Alessandro Ingaria. It’s an Abisso Studios production — a Trentino-based film production and services company — made in collaboration with Emergency. Ingaria, a director, audiovisual artist, journalist and photographer, has covered crises in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan, and is currently developing a feature about the detention of Patrick Zaki in Egypt — the Egyptian researcher and Erasmus Mundus master’s student at the University of Bologna who spent 22 months in Egyptian prisons over his human rights work and political opinions expressed on social media. Their short, The Sense of Earth, is a 14-minute hybrid black-and-white animated narrative dedicated to the tragedy of migrants who died in the Mediterranean.
The Orizzonti competition — long dedicated to emerging global cinema trends, in particular new filmmakers and lesser-known or minor cinematic traditions — also features Bleu au loin, a ten-minute French short by Iranian director Amir Houshang Moein, in which “a fisherman living in exile on a remote coast dives into the sea to escape the trauma of war.” The same section also includes the four-minute Head of a Camel by Shannon Lee, an independent animator and visual artist. Shannon presents this short in which, “after growing up assimilated into Western culture, a Korean-American woman tries to reconnect with her cultural roots by conjuring a mystical creature through an ancient Taoist recipe.”
Read more: Cinema & Video International Issue #208
