Winners
18th Edition 7 September - 12 September 2021SIFF centered its 18th edition around themes of dramatic current topics and timeless impulses, between philosophy and psychology, news and history, declined, between poetry and realistic razors, as every “heretical” reading at the faithful service of authenticity and truth should do, out of any ideologism, traveling among the countries of the world, without gender fences and on the contrary valuing the uniqueness of every type and caliber as resources, launching into pike dives or acrobatic flights into the future around the corner, desired but also possible. SIFF winners give particular emphasis to the unspoken, to the resonances and cosmic symphonies that unite us all and which, always in the name of that beauty and cooperation of which Cinema is synthesis and expression, if we believe in it and we commit to it, will save us
And the Winner is…
Best Film
D MINOR Directed by Giuseppe Ferlito | Italy 2020 | 121 ‘
For the fresco full of pathos of a land – an island that is an offshoot of a peninsula – the trinacria – of millenary culture, outlined with that raw and affectionate honesty that only a native, such as the director, as a Sicilian, could render without pretense and yet with affectionate honesty, recalling the myths and history without disdaining the news. For the celebration of the power of life and love over death and hate.
Best Actress
SUSSAN PARVAR – Iranian actress starring in the film BOTOX directed by Kaveh Mazaheri | Iran 2020 | 101 ‘
Two sisters share a house on the outskirts of an Iranian city conspiring to cover up the disappearance of their brother to carry out a program to get rich by growing magic mushrooms. The subversive and unexpected film that explores the rights and action of women within a society that requires a man to approve of any important decision, including that of turning the living room into a hallucinogenic mushroom farm. It is an amazing film debut by Kaveh Mazaheri.
Best Actor
EMRE CETINKAYA – Turkish actor starring in the film I AM YOU directed by Sonia Nassery Cole | Afghanistan 2020 | 90 ‘
Emre Cetinkaya, who in a film that has the aftertaste of a documentary, taken as it is from a true story, makes the double track of despair and hope, as it could not have been better, in a film that catapults us into coherent horrors and throws us from the present in very dusky hues into a future conquered at the cost of usury, but also of family reunification and kept promises, with good overcoming evil and love winning over death.
Best Soundtracks
East – Last Minute Dictatorship
Film directed by Antonio Pisu | Italy 2020 | 104′
Soundtracks by Davide Caprelli
East – Last Minute Dictatorship is in fact a film based on a true story based on a journey that Paganelli and Riceputi themselves undertook in 1989 when they were twenty-four. In the film version there are three travelers, played by Lodo Guenzi, Jacopo CostantiniandMatteo Gatta. The special and debut participation of Lodo Guenzi, guitar and voice of Lo Stato Sociale.
Best Cinematography
BLOODSHOT HEART | CUORE INSANGUINATO
Directed by Parish Malfitano | Australia 2020 | 90′
Cinematography by: Susan Lumsdon
For the very happy collaboration between direction and photography to make the nightmares and dreams of escape of those who, as in this case, resort to every stratagem the mind is able to formulate, in its wildest fantasies, to imagine themselves free from the prison of family harassment (again the relationship with the mother, in a tragic key in this film) that become emotional vampires. Visionary and overwhelming with a screaming photo handwriting.
Best Documentary
THE LAST MOVIE PAINTER Directed by Walter Bencini | Italy 2020 | 81′
This work documents cinema through one of those voices that contribute to the success of a film. Casaro, a living pride among the creatives-illustrators-of his field, also appreciated abroad by well-known directors, deserves most of the credit for having known and wanted to lend his technical competence and his acumen and talent to the cinema.
BEST ITALIAN SHORT
FAME Directed by Giuseppe Alessio Nuzzo | Italy 2020 | 11′
For the unforgettable scenario of a Naples, intertwining cultures and theater of contradictions, a training ground for strong and opposite feelings, a casket of misery and nobility in which hunger, at the center in every sense of this 2021 edition, is for dignity, equity, security and minimum guaranteed rights, but also for wealth, power and success and of how in a city symbol of imbalances but also of exceptional resources and wonders, there are very real possible miracles, although often improbable or incredible, as taught by Saint Gennaro.
Best Short | Women in Cinema
MILA – Directed by Cinzia Angelini | USA 2020 | 20′
For the collective effort towards a result in animation which combines the themes of war, the strength of women to overcome any tragedy starting from the greatest imaginable for a living being as the unnatural death of one’s own creature. For having grasped the propulsive and regenerating force of imagination and fantasy as tools to get out of the tunnel, connecting to the child that every adult, however hardened or injured, jealously keeps within himself.
Best International Short
FEELING THROUGH – Directed by Doug Roland | USA 2020 | 19′
For the exceptional, sensational reversed vision of disability and of how no handicap, which is not in the silence, in the blindness and deafness of the heart, will be able to prevent us from communicating and from feeling recognized and seen by the other and to see the other not for his or her packaging, but for his aura and his soul and to know and feel, only then, that “Everything will be fine” if, without forcing it on us, we will take care of what we carry with us.
SPECIAL MENTION
FLASH – GIUSEPPE PARISI STORY Documentary directed by Marco Rosson | Italy 2020 | 65 ‘
For the demonstration that even anger, if channeled correctly, can be transformed into a driving force to emerge. For the ability to brush the sinusoidal trend of every life in which the difference will be made by the approach, the gaze, the psychological determination associated with the skills that will have been acquired.