Politics is an invention without a future

This year, driven by a provocative feeling, we thought of paraphrasing the famous quote attributed to Louis Lumière “cinema is an invention without a future” as the title of the 19th edition of SorsiCorti.

You know, things have a beginning and an end. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t correspond to a potential change, but to do so something must die.

Over the past eighteen years, we have seen various ways of doing the festival “die” and with them some of the objects we used: for example, the video recorder with which we screened the first short films that arrived on VHS, or the hundreds of flyers that we distributed by hand in the alleys of Palermo’s historic centre to attract new audience.

We have witnessed an exponential increase in short film productions and the rise of dedicated distribution platforms around the world. Witnessing, for example, the growing output of Iranian independent cinema, which has produced films of extraordinary originality and beauty in recent years, is no small feat.

Their way of overcoming economic and logistical difficulties (a few years ago one of our Iranian jurors was unable to attend the screenings due to the ongoing uprising in Iran) was and still is an example for those who produce short films in Western comfort zones.

Involving groups of significant people over the years, giving them the opportunity to make an impact (expressing their opinion as jurors) has been a political as well as cultural act for us: minors on the criminal circuit, immigrants full of stories to share and users (but people even before users) relating to Mental Health are just some of our most welcome active participants.

SorsiCorti for us is Cinema, Culture, Wine, but also Sociality and Politics. Then perhaps we can hope that this year’s title, like Louis Lumière’s phrase, is just a mistake of perspective evaluation and that Politics, like Cinema, continues to do its work of inclusion.