Growth – a very welcome development on part of the local Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. Their upcoming Short Film Festival, run entirely by students, shows a rich programme of screenings and meetings with industry professionals, like filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, who will interact with a passionate, curious audience. Large space has been given to animation, a technique, more than a genre, that allows to go further than others can. Round tables and master classes will tell us more about the state of the art of a world that embraces audiences of all ages, transversal and inter-generational. The main Competition will see 30 participating short movies produced by senior students from 26 countries. A recurring theme in this edition is youth alienation and the responsibility of families. We discussed this and more with the programme’s director Roberta Novielli.

What to expect from the 2025 Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival.
In continuity with former editions, our Festival looks forward to a future that we would like to see improving, especially from a political and economic perspective. Many of the films we nominated try to give a positive spin to current matters, and that’s important. At the same time, the Festival will map budding possibilities of future cinema: new languages, new opportunities for what is essentially a means of expression. Looking far into the horizon has never been as important as it is today – our Festival always did, and thanks to the energy of young filmmakers, it will keep doing so.

Finding the best.
We were met with incredible responsiveness from the short film universe. 3061 films were submitted to the competition from 119 countries. All the world was represented, as one can see on the map we published on our website, with only a few exceptions in inner Africa, where filmmakers lack the means to respond to international calls the way they’d love, and Greenland. It is quite important to notice how short film production is a very vital industry, one that displays extraordinary aesthetical and narrative intensity and one that constantly looks for a point of meeting between different visual styles. We are honoured and happy that our Festival can be one of those meeting points.

Themes and discoveries.
More than a single title, I would like to highlight a series of entries produced in countries that are geographically and culturally far apart that have a theme in common: very young characters – children – trying to set straight errors committed by earlier generations. Geography is so diverse we can hardly label it, though all cultures have shared values, especially if seen through the eyes of the younger generations. Gender issues are also very delicately pictured: there will be films on transsexuality and on the cultural trauma that young homosexuals live anywhere in the world today. One film that stuck with me is Dragfox by British filmmaker Lisa Ott. It is a film on a discovery of homosexuality on part of a child. It is a funny little musical curated in every little detail and it will open the Competition, which goes to show how dear we hold this topic.

The evolution of short film.
There are two ways of looking at it. The narrative underpinning of short film hasn’t changed much over the last several years. Short film is a great tool in itself and one that helped some of the greatest filmmakers get their footing in the industry. Martin Scorsese’s first film, just to name one, is a short. Short film is a complete media, and always has been.
The affirmation of short film as a format has been helped immensely by digital media, to which we owe a dramatic raise in quality. Any digital camera can, today, realize picture-perfect short movies. Digital technologies help us experiment much more extensively than in the past and allow hybridization of different techniques.

Preview day and animation.
We provocatively used the term anymation to highlight how animation shouldn’t be restricted to specific audiences or themes. Our Anymation programme is rich, and includes a round table and the presentation on our project on immersive media: immersiVenice. We will screen over twenty animation shorts. Also included in the programme is a focus on the origins of cinema curated by Carlo Montanaro, who will discuss the birth of animation in Italy with a selection of animated works, from the very first animated sequence in Italian cinema to productions from the 1940s and 1950s.
Animation is so much more than film: video gaming, immersive media, advertisement. Even though the bare number of animation films submitted to us is in line with previous years, we decided to include more of them in our shortlist. Our nominees were that powerful.
Looking back a couple decades, animation hasn’t been a children’s affair at least since MTV started airing music videos that used animation extensively. The world of animation is truly open to any forms of artistic expression. It is free, open, and interactive.

The Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival fifteen years in the future.
I see a Festival that is just at ease with younger audiences as it is today. Fifteen years from now, and even further on, I hope. I also hope that it will follow their vision and channel their lively passion, maybe with the help of experienced professionals. Our Festival exists thanks to 150 students who worked to make it possible. It is their Festival, and always will be.