Announcement of the 2022 selection committee of Villa Medici Film Festival

Villa Medici Film Festival returns for its second edition from 14 to 18 September 2022 and announces its 2022 selection committee.

Created in 2021, Villa Medici Film Festival explores the ever-closer links between cinema and contemporary art and sets out to discover new styles of film. For its second edition from 14 to 18 September 2022, the Festival is fostering its role as a pioneer by encouraging meetings between works with diverse profiles that question, disrupt, divert or enchant our relationship with images once again. Since its first edition, the Festival has brought a community of authors and film lovers together at Villa Medici to foster collective thinking about cinema and its evolution. Artists, filmmakers and academics from all continents will meet in September at Villa Medici to celebrate the vitality of contemporary film practices through a selection of proposals – films by authors, essays, works of fiction or documentaries – that stand out for the singularity of their subject matter or form.

In line with its first edition, the Festival is split into three parts: the International competition with around fifteen contemporary films of all genres and lengths; the parallel “Focus” programme with films by out-of-competition artists, masterclasses and exceptional encounters; and the great Piazzale evenings which bring together all kinds of viewers for outdoor screenings of previously unseen films, with many previews but also classic films screened in restored versions.

After plunging into the uneasy effervescence of the movement for freedom in Hong Kong filmed from inside the Polytechnic University (Inside the Red Brick Wall by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers collective, Prize Villa Medici for Best Film awarded by Béla Tarr, Mati Diop and Teresa Castro) to the world of Bolivian mines (El Gran Movimiento by Kiro Russo, Jury Prize 2021), the competition of this second edition of the Festival will offer new incursions into worlds near and far that shed light on contemporary issues.

The unique thing about the Villa Medici Film Festival is that a selection committee is appointed each year to choose the films in competition according to an approach that is as open as possible to the diversity of practices, forging unexpected links between disciplines and authors, whether filmmakers, plastic artists or visual artists. For this second edition, the selection committee is made up of Leonardo Bigazzi, Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou, Mathilde Henrot and Lili Hinstin.

The 2022 selection committee

Leonardo Bigazzi is curator of the Festival Lo Schermo dell’Arte (2008-ongoing) and VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images (2012-ongoing). Since 2020 he has also been working as a curator at the Fondazione In Between Art Film, where he is responsible for commissioning and producing artists’ films.

Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou is an exhibition curator, film festival programmer (Semaine de la Critique – Cannes Festival, Marrakech International Film Festival) and researcher. She teaches at the HEAD in Geneva. Her research-creation work focuses on Afro-diaporic cinema and visual arts.

Mathilde Henrot is the founder of the websites Festival Scope and Festival Scope Pro, along with Alessandro Raja. She has been organising online and in-theatre film festivals for many years, including the Sarajevo and Locarno film festivals.

Lili Hinstin is a programmer and artistic director. In charge of cinema at Villa Medici between 2005 and 2009, she became a programmer for the Cinéma du Réel festival from 2010 to 2013. Lili Hinstin then became artistic director of the Belfort Film Festival (2013-2018), then of the Locarno Film Festival (2018-2020).

Contact:
[email protected]

Festival Organising Committee:

Lili Hinstin (programmer and artistic director), Laurent Perreau (author and director), Sam Stourdzé (director of the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici), Véronique Terrier Hermann (professor and author).

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