For the fifth consecutive year I have the pleasure of taking care of the artistic direction of the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival with Andrea Mura.
The festival will be held from 2 to 8 July 2018 in the beautiful Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo and then will see a second venue in Treviso from 10 to 16 September. There are 28 documentaries selected in the competition.
Sole Luna Doc Film Festival
Palermo, 2-8 luglio /July 2018
Santa Maria dello Spasimo
Ingresso gratuito/free entrance
www.solelunadoc.org
Chiara Andrich, Andrea Mura
Direzione artistica | Artistic direction
Sole Luna Doc Film Festival, in its thirteenth edition, confirms itself as a space of contamination of looks, listenings, visions and encounters on the contemporary world. Its focus is the documentary cinema with a programme full of screenings and guests, with 28 documentaries in competition between short films and feature films, divided into the Human Rights, The Journey and Short docs sections.
The selected films offer an overview of current film production and are characterized by a great variety, both thematic and stylistic: from the observational documentary to the social denunciation film, from the intimate diary to the experimental and research cinema. A variety that testifies the vitality of the documentary, its ability to have a watchful eye on the world and to find new ways of expression and narration.
The topics of the films chosen are those that have always characterized Sole Luna Doc Film Festival, an intercultural journey that stimulates the knowledge of near and distant realities: from the nomadic and mystic world of Fulani shepherds in Burkina Faso to the one contaminated by the colonization of the Ma’ohui people in the Philippines, from the melancholy pilgrimages of wandering men in Arzerbaigian to the life of transgender teenagers in Nairobi. Great attention is also paid to extremely current issues such as employment and denied workers rights, the Middle East war and the migration issue. In the end, there are many films in which directors talk about themselves in the first person, making their lives an exemplary “historical” proof, investigating their past to think about the present, comparing themselves to their origins.
Concerning the Out of competition, we have chosen numerous feature and short films on issues related to human rights and the environment, presented in collaboration with other festivals such as the Festival international du film insulaire de Groix and the Animaphix International Animation Festival, as well as with associations and foreign cultural institutes in Palermo, with the aim of “networking” and “establish ties”.
Since the happy contingency of the choice of Palermo as Italian Capital of Culture 2018, this year the Sole Luna goes beyond documentary cinema and include other forms of art with the Arts in festival, which includes a series of events and hosts international artists. In this context, we present the showcase Renegotiating identities, curated by the young curator Sofia Gotti, a selection of video-art short films on the controversial theme of identity in an environment and a time in constant transformation. In the delightful spaces of Santa Maria dello Spasimo we host the photographic exhibition Il sacro degli altri by Attilio Russo and Giuseppe Muccio, a spotlight on the artist Martina Melilli and the Crossfade Sound space created ad hoc by two musicians in-residencies: Davide Cairo and Francesco Novara. Gianluca Costantini, the designer and activist, will be also our guest for the second year occupying another fascinating space in Palermo: the prison of the Inquisition of Palazzo Steri, where the artist for three days will be engaged in a drawing performance telling the stories and the words of those unjustly detained.
We finally paid tribute to the city, to its history and culture with a meeting, in collaboration with Fondazione Benetton Studi e Ricerche, on the garden of Maredolce-La Favara and the screening of the documentary of the same name by Davide Gambino.
Sole Luna Doc Film Festival this year, with its multifaceted programming, wants to be more and more a place of discovery and meeting in a frontier space open to the world where cinema can become a compass to orient oneself in the complicated present.