The cinema of Theo Angelopoulos and of Federico Fellini is celebrated in the image chosen for the new official poster of the 70th Venice International Film Festival, directed by Alberto Barbera and organized by the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, which will be held at the Lido from August 28 to September 7, 2013.
Created by Simone Massi – the animator, director and illustrator of the Festival’s opening sequence – the image recalls a frame from the film by Theo Angelopoulos, Eternity and a Day (1998), starring Bruno Ganz. A man seen from behind waves his arms at a boat which, in the distance, is carrying a child and a rhinoceros. A tongue-in-cheek reference to last year’s poster (which was inspired by Federico Fellini’s 1983 film, And the Ship Sails On), the poster marks both continuity and a break with the past. It also invites viewers to look beyond, to roam using their imagination.
Once again, the coordinated visual identity and image of the Venice Film Festival have been entrusted to Milan’s Studio Graph.X, based on the drawings by Simone Massi.
Simone Massi, who received a David di Donatello in 2012 for Best Short Film, created the opening sequence which preceded the official screenings at the Venice Film Festival last year. The 30-second sequence, created from 300 hand-made drawings, cites Fellini, Angelopoulos, Wenders, Olmi, Tarkovsky and Dovzhenko. Massi designed the opening sequence with the contribution of Fabrizio Tassi. The soundtrack was written and performed by Francesca Badalini, while the sound design was by Stefano Sasso. Julia Gromskaya was behind the camera, with Lola Capote-Ortiz in charge of post-production.
Massi, who was born in Pergola in 1970, is one of the last masters of stop motion animation and has won over 200 awards at the major film festivals, in Italy and abroad. He is also widely considered one of the most important authors of animated short films. An independent animator, he studied film animation at the Urbino School of Art. Over the course of 15 years, he has created and made (by himself and completely by hand) fifteen animated films which have been shown in 54 countries and which were screened at the 69th Venice Film Festival in 2012, along with an unreleased film, Animo resistente. Massi does not use a computer in his work; he draws everything by hand on paper, using pencils, charcoal, coloured chalk, pastels, graphite, and India ink. The “scratch” technique he has adopted in his most recent works – which permits a maximum of 6-7 drawings to be completed in a day, working nonstop from morning to night – means that an 8-minute film can take up to two and a half years of work.
