Short Summer is the best debut

The film by Nastia Korkia is the best debut at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, winning the coveted Lion of the Future – Luigi De Laurentiis Venice Award for a Debut Film. Short Summer is one of five first films out of the ten titles in competition at Giornate, and this is the seventh time that a Giornate degli Autori title has been honored with this award, after, in 2021, Imaculat by Monica Stan and George Chiper-Lillemark; in 2019, You Will Die at 20 by Amjad Abu Alala; in 2010, Majority by Seren Yüce; in 2007, La zona by Rodrigo Plá; in 2006, Khadak by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth; and in 2005, 13 Tzameti by Géla Babluani.

The award for Nastia Korkia’s debut film was assigned by the International Jury headed by Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells and composed of the Franco-Tunisian filmmaker, producer, and former journalist Erige Sehiri and the Italian screenwriter and director Silvio Soldini. The award carries a cash prize of $100,000, provided by Filmauro, which will be split equally between the filmmaker and the producer.

“We are delighted and proud that the jury decided to give the award to Short Summer,” says Gaia Furrer, Artistic Director of Giornate, “a film which, with extraordinary sensitivity and restraint, succeeds in interweaving the lyricism of childhood and the harshness of a society scarred by war and propaganda. Nastia Korkia’s debut reminds us all of the ways in which fear and violence silently insinuate themselves into daily life, shaping the world of a little girl not through major events but the smallest of details. Short Summer is a poignant love letter with frames that reveal a skillful hand at using sound and natural light. Watching Short Summer, we find ourselves face to face with the fragility of existence, torn between the horrors on the horizon and the delicacy of a young person’s breath as she longs for a different and better future.”

“This is the crowning glory of an innovative lineup,” declare the President of Giornate Francesco Ranieri Martinotti and General Delegate Giorgio Gosetti, “a film that grasps the present even through the filter of history and memory. The hunches of our Artistic Director Gaia Furrer have led us to win the Lion of the Future for the seventh time, an award with a consummate prestige for which we wish to thank the jury and the entire Biennale, which includes, every year, parallel sections like the Critics’ Week and Giornate, in an overall vision of cinema that shows that Venice is the real international gold standard for film and its new frontiers.”