A total of 446 works from all over the world were submitted to the selectors of Asolo Art Film Festival, who selected 92 to be included across the different sections of the programme: films on art, films as works of art, video art, animation, “prime expressions”, and finally documentaries on social, political and environmental issues within the “Anthropica” category.

As Competition Director Piero Deggiovanni explains—one of Italy’s leading experts on the relationships between visual arts, experimental cinema and digital technologies—the variety and richness of the linguistic and formal solutions found in this edition of Asolo Art Film Festival can be grouped into two major macro-areas: East and West.

In the East, and especially in the Middle East and China, ethnic themes play a central role, highlighting the importance of identity even before national identity—cultural identity: ancestral and rural roots, alongside a strong focus on the dramatic nature of existence in large urban agglomerations.

In the West, and also in certain areas of the East with advanced capitalism such as Taiwan, themes are more varied and research into film language tends to focus on more classical frameworks: video performance, editing experimentation, and the search for original subjects.

Interestingly, artificial intelligence is not widely used, except in the films by Taiwanese filmmaker Chih Hao Shen, who has brought the narration of his territory’s reality to levels of sublime surrealism.

And here lies perhaps the most significant novelty of this year’s festival: it highlights a marked tendency to move beyond realism in favour of the “truths” hidden in the folds of the real.

All of this is made possible by a strong vocation to imagine and describe the world beyond sensible reality.

Chiara Pavan