"When someone manages to shoot a film in the same way as a thirteen-year-old girl writes her secret diary, only then can cinema be considered true art. (Francis Ford Coppola) "
Anyone could make a film! ... and the River Film Festival supports and encourages not only directors but also those who only dream of making a film. Already this year’s winner of the first edition (2012) of the “River Corto” competition for filmscripts has realised that dream and has made a 6 minute short.
This year the Festival is inaugurating a new section, entitled Extreme short films: extreme shorts last from one and a half to five minutes.
Seoul international extreme-short image & film festival (SESIFF) was founded in 2009 and was the first Asian festival with the motto “Anyone can make a film – the festival made by the public”. SESIFF has shown films in stations, the underground, in the streets, in clubs and bars … wherever there was a television. Now the River Film Festival of Padua are partners with the film festivals of Seoul, Berlin, Porto, Ismailia, Kazan, Teheran and Belgrade and is adding this new section, Extreme shorts, to its list of festival competitions for awards.
The extreme shorts entered in the Festival, films shot with any means or equipment, from cameras to mobile phones which last a maximum of five minutes, will be shown in continuous loop on trams, buses and in bus shelters throughout Padua throughout the Festival. During the closing event of the Festival, these films will be judged by their audience, the people on the trams, or on the buses, who will vote to select the 5 Best Extreme shorts. The prize for the five winners will be that their short will automatically take part in the Seoul International Extreme-short Image & Film Festival (South Korea).
We think that five minutes is enough to reveal the infinite potential of artistic talents with exceptional new imagination. Indeed, when the seventh art, motion pictures, first began with Étienne Jules Marey’s “photographic gun” (as his “camera” was called - hence the English term “to shoot” a film), 5 minutes were the maximum time that could be shot in one continuous strip, thus the maximum time a scene, often complete in itself, could last: an extreme short.
Direttore artistico Emilio Della Chiesa