SorsiCorti 19th Edition
AWARDS AND MOTIVATIONS ASSIGNED BY TECHNICAL JURY
BEST SHORT FILM
Violette Gitton | France | 2024 | 17’59” | fiction
“Ce qui appartient à César” is a touching coming-of-age story about a young boy’s rude awakening to the real world. César is at that impressionable age where he can be swayed in many directions. Surrounded by an atmosphere of masculinity and testosterone, he believes he knows what it means to be a man—until he learns that his older sister has been sexually abused. This revelation sends him on a journey of questioning his reality, his choices, and his identity.
The film is beautifully crafted—expertly shot, directed, and edited—and the performances by the young actors are remarkable. César’s transformation unfolds subtly and naturally; his struggle to protect his sister, despite his youth and uncertainty, is deeply moving and relatable. The score draws us into César’s inner world without ever overwhelming it, while the editing contrasts the fast-paced locker-room energy with the stillness of his solitary moments.
In a world where toxic masculinity remains pervasive—where boys are pressured to act and think a certain way, “Ce qui appartient à César” stands out as a quiet yet powerful portrait of a child who begins to question the norms before it’s too late.
BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Matteo Burani | Italy | 2024 | 8’59” | animation
Fragile clay sculptures, created by an ambitious sculptor, come to life inside a dark workshop. They only want to be accepted and loved; however, perfection is not an easy goal for an artist, and so they are terribly discarded.
The animated film by Studio Croma Animation in Bologna, with intelligence, unease, and excellent technique, ruthlessly tells us about the human condition, taking its cue from the artist’s relationship with his work. What does it mean to create?
What remains of all our undeveloped ideas, of imperfect, abandoned works?
What remains of all that humanity not accepted by the system that registers you with a number and then deletes you as a failed attempt? Perhaps what remains is the bitterness of feeling ourselves as human beings in a continuous and eternal failure. But Playing God reminds us that, fortunately, we are never completely alone.
BEST EXPERIMENTAL SHORT FILM
Alex Anna | Canada | 2024 | 19’58” | documentary
In “Create;Survive”, Alex Anna masterfully constructs a fil rouge where autobiographical narration and testimony of a real event —the Off-Courts festival in Trouville, Canada— intertwine and complement each other, even through a deliberate and measured use of diverse and seemingly distant audiovisual languages. In this way, the author manages to document both her experience at the festival and her inner life, offering us constant juxtapositions, such as that between the social mask and personal and intimate suffering, between the desire to do and the depressive block, as if the story of the festival experience were a luminous photograph and the representation of the protagonist’s intimate life the negative of that same photograph.
BEST DIRECTOR
Simon Woods | UK | 2023 | 17’23” | fiction
On a beautiful spring day, Sam and his parents gather with their relatives at an English villa.
From the very first images, we understand that something disturbing lurks behind the laughter, the family hugs, and the attention that the father showers on his wife on her birthday.
Yet the clues, distributed with incredible skill throughout the film, will only reveal the chilling truth at the ending. In the improvised theater game, Sam, the child with the dark and deep gaze, finds the opportunity to unmask the monster. In Simon Woods’ film, the direction of the elements, through the skill of the actors, takes us by the hand into the mind of a child, beyond bourgeois appearances, into the black hole of a family drama.
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Michele Gallone | Italy | 2024 | 19’03” | fiction
A black-and-white cinematography, with almost metaphysical tones, that, without the use of any special effects, transforms the interiors and exteriors of real buildings into the scenario of a dystopian near future.
SPECIAL MENTION PERSONAL AND ARTISTIC PROJECT
Kazuya Ashizawa | Japan | 2025 | 12’22” | documentary
The personal story of its director travels parallel to the story told in the short film. It’s a story of peaceful and loving resistance. Kazuya Ashizawa after working for many years for a national institution, now retired, decides to study cinematographic techniques, realizes documentaries independently and is the owner of a non-profit film production company.
The short film: One day, a special train is scheduled to pass through to attract tourists, and an “unknown” local man decides to do something to prevent the railway line from closing: he dresses up as a dinosaur. It tells the story of the resistance and survival of places, both physical and spiritual, speaking to us of a territory with mythical and fairy-tale contours in which the element of the fairy tale is transformed, revealing a human being who does not want to surrender to the process of oblivion inherent in the modern race to fulfil desires.
The beautiful photography manages to fully capture all aspects: the colours, the views, their nuances and the linearity of a story that follows the one of a railway line which, used by only a few students, is in danger of disappearing. There is no dialogue, nothing happens, but in its non-happening, a world opens up. A world linked to Eastern wisdom, a world made up of glances, sighs and irony, which seeks to preserve its memory threatened by the race for efficiency at all costs.
It is a simple story, charged with an apparent mystery that has the flavour of life.
SPECIAL MENTION
Erik Jasaň | Romania, Slovakia | 2024 | 14’28” | fiction
For the social issue addressed and for its ability to open up a range of reflections concerning society as a whole.
The short film is inspired by the practice of so-called professional foster care in Slovakia: professional foster parents take care of childrens and welcome them into their families, receiving a salary in exchange. These are mainly children of Roma origin.
For families, this often meant a way out of financial difficulties, apparently concealing the racist tendencies inherent in the system.
The harsh reality. The periphery. The periphery of the world and of humanity. There are neither winners nor losers. Racism inherent in the lowest class, hidden on the surface, disruptive when the reckoning comes.
It is a political, social, and moral discourse at the same time that we are talking about and relating to. Starting from a personal experience, a touching and decisive experience, the director recounts the defeat of a society, of the individual, the protagonist Ingrid, and of an entire system.
The economic collapse that leaves no escape and the hatred that emerges. The lack of human relationships and solidarity. The lack of class recognition.
The only enduring hope: the natural empathy of the two young protagonists, which offers us the possibility of a better future.
Hope that resides and “sounds” like a key in the lock, at the end of everything, in the closing credits.
The revolution is entrusted to the gaze of the two girls who, from the very first moment, recognise each other as belonging to the same human race.
SPECIAL MENTION
Cristina Principe | Italy | 2025 | 15’44” | documentary
For its political action to promote blind baseball as a Paralympic discipline and as a means of ‘inclusion and social transformation’.
The short film accompanies Vanessa’s day with a lucid, passionate, never rhetorical look and after preparing, she joins her teammates for the final of the blind baseball championship.
The camera follows the protagonist as she takes us through the streets of the city to the sports field and tells us about her experience of participating in and deeply embracing this sport.
The director’s support for blind baseball to become a Paralympic sport is the fundamental aspect of the short film, but her political action is accompanied by a profound nature that has to do with the concept of “desiring beings” and self-determination.
Skillfully constructed in a simple and linear manner, the work manages to create a certain suspense thanks to its beautiful editing and use of sound, a fundamental element of blind baseball. Sound accompanies and guides us in a free field where movement is synonymous with freedom.
The direction allows us to savour this freedom, making us part of it.
The use of sporting metaphors is wonderful for talking about life without any rhetoric, about the courage to always go all the way, because, as the coach says, perhaps without realising she is addressing all of us: it’s not over until it’s over.
AUDIENCE AWARD
TJ O’Grady – Peyton | Irlanda | 2023 | 18’30” | fiction
POSITIVAMENTETV AWARD
Award assigned by the participants in the “Laboratorio FilmMaker”, presented by PositivamenteTV, a project by the Department of Mental Health-CSM1 Palermo, to reduce the stigma associated with mental illness through the production of audiovisuals based on the ideas and active contributions of users of the Department itself.
Erik Jasaň | Romania, Slovakia | 2024 | 14’28” | fiction
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