Eleven days journeying between film worlds near and far, moving through pre-established realities and futures yet to be invented
It’s a sort of homecoming, one eagerly awaited, that will inaugurate the 23rd Giornate degli Autori tomorrow. The Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát, in competition back in 2020 with her Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, returns to Giornate with My Notes on Mars, her first international film in English, starring Mackenzie Davis and Rupert Friend. A romantic sci-fi picture, mysterious and seductive, that begins with the disappearance of a young scientist and her sudden return weeks later, with no memory of her life before; unleashing an exploration of identity, memory, love, and the question of whether we can really know those around us.
A film that launches a selection rippling with motion and an array of characters moving from place to place. In the ten films in competition, these individuals lose their own place in the world, in different ways, and are forced to seek or invent a new one by crossing borders that are geographical, social, linguistic, and emotional. Characters challenge belonging, identity, and relations, and cinema itself seems to move along with them, mingling fictive and documentary spheres, autobiography and narrative, memory and invention.
“These films arrive from countries, cultures, and film traditions that are richly varied, yet all seem to share the need to seek new ways of depicting a world undergoing great changes,” declares Artistic Director Gaia Furrer. “It’s a cinema on the move, one that doesn’t settle for conventional categories; making for films in which relationships, encounters, and chances to create new ways of belonging often wind up being more important than pre-established identities.”
Created on impulse in 2004, by the filmmakers’ associations ANAC and 100autori, Giornate now commences its first edition without Giorgio Gosetti, who founded and guided the showcase for over twenty years. His absence is deeply felt, a void impossible to fill, and Giornate has chosen to move on by continuing to build on the legacy he left us: a space that is free and open to discovery; and a collective gaze on present and future. Starting this year, Giorgio’s name will be affixed to the Laguna Film Lab, an artistic residency created along with Andrea Segre, in which four emerging filmmakers embark on an exploration of the documentary genre that will lead them to make a collective film to be premiered at Giornate 2027.
The program for the 23rd edition brings together 25 world premieres, 14 of them directed by women: ten films in the International Competition, five Special Events, a closing film out of competition, two short films for Miu Miu Women’s Tales and nine titles in Venetian Nights, organized in accord with Isola Edipo. From Nigeria, in our competition for the first time, to Ukraine; from Argentina to Bosnia; from Mexico to Italy, a very different genres, languages, and cinematic forms make up a selection that ranges across the present without forfeiting its freedom of invention.
In the Sala Perla, the Casa degli Autori, and the Sala Laguna, Giornate degli Autori invites audiences to feast on eleven days of cinema that crosses boundaries, challenges received notions, and seeks out new ways to tell the world’s stories.
