The festival pays special attention to works created by students from Fine Arts Academies, Film Schools and national and international Universities—privileged spaces for observing and monitoring new generations of authors and filmmakers.

About twenty works were submitted to the 42nd edition of Asolo Art Film Festival, mostly from across Europe: these are highly varied projects, both in the themes they address and in the formal solutions they adopt.

Many of the works, as Competition Director Deggiovanni explains, reflect above all on the theme of childhood and the condition of infancy.

“They range from issues linked to the loss of physical, ambulatory and cognitive abilities, to the intrusiveness of transhumanist ideologies that shape perception and everyday experience as a result of digitalisation, and even to the emergence of a parental ‘class’ that is insensitive, unaffectionate and narcissistic—causing profound psychological suffering in children.

The programme then moves toward documentary narratives of poetic figures treated with a cinematic rigour that has become increasingly rare, and finally reaches the question of identity. Here, a clear division emerges between East and West. While in the East there is a tendency to evoke one’s roots as a cultural foundation and an indispensable reference point for adult personality, in the West—after decades of deconstructing every national, local, ethnic and personal value—we have arrived at a total loss of roots, replaced by a ‘pre-cooked’ personality shaped by supranational powers in order to create weak, interchangeable identities.

Bringing this neo-existential drama to the surface, however, shows that young Western people are developing a desire for change.”

Chiara Pavan