Fantasy, mystery, and magic

A significant debut in the world of comics and then cinema: first collaborating with great directors like Wong Kar-Wai, Soderbergh, and Antonioni, then as a creative consultant on animation projects, including Enzo Calò’s Pinocchio, and finally as a director, debuting at Cannes with The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, inspired by Dino Buzzati’s tale/allegory. Currently, some of his original drawings are on display at the major exhibition on comic book masters at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, titled La BD à tous les étages. For the seventh consecutive year, Lorenzo Mattotti signs the image of the Venice Film Festival, both graphically, with his imaginative illustrations, and as an animation, creating the short film projected as the opening sequence before each film.

An elephant dominates the center of the new Venice Film Festival poster. But what is an elephant doing in the Lagoon? The author explains: “It is certainly an unusual, unexpected image, but it takes us back in memory to when, many years ago, an elephant arrived in Venice and wandered around the narrow Venetian streets during a famous Biennale Carnival in 1981… This Elephant now crosses the Lagoon and travels the paths of Fantasy, Mystery and Magic that are discovered in Cinema. He himself is a Memory and also the History of Cinema: a party, a parade, a show! And this specially-coloured Elephant also reminds us of the Exotic, the Faraway, the East, a look towards other civilisations, other cultures… At the Venice Mostra other worlds, other languages, other fantasies have always met, and have been arriving in the Lagoon for 92 years. An Elephant that goes towards the East, but which has the ability to welcome everyone.”