The Pentedattilo Film Festival is an international short-film event which, against all odds, has created a new frontier for worldwide short films in Southern Italy.
The location is the evocative hamlet of Pentedattilo, in the province of Reggio Calabria, a village which has enthralled many famous travellers of the past, and is now available to new explorers who may follow this extraordinary cultural route, designed to recover the hamlet regardless of some inappropriate choices made in the past. This ghost town, perched on top of a rock resembling five fingers [Pentedattilo comes from the Greek for five fingers, in fact], majestically towering over the nearby seascape, comes back to life with the Pentedattilo Film Festival, an event eager to make itself known, as it breaks the bonds of indifference in an attempt to affirm its exceptional intrinsic, artistic and film-production values. The Pentedattilo Film Festival is a festival which focuses exclusively on shorts, on discovering and presenting new talents, on promoting meetings between young filmmakers and established masters of cinema, while offering the public a vision of “another” kind of film, by fostering a substantial web of artistic circulation and exchange.

HISTORY

Since its debut, in 2006, the Festival has become pivotal thanks to its originality and the quality of the films screened, making an authoritative entry into the international network of film festivals that make short films the core of their programme. During the days of the festival the wonderful backdrop of Pentedattilo becomes a singular location of physical and metaphorical exchange, an area on the move, to use the phrase launched by the Festival’s Main Section. An area on the move means one that breathes and lives at last, beyond the confines of a postcard, in a state of perpetual motion while occupying an unusual habitat, abjuring stereotypical formulae and looking forward to a future of awareness and cultural growth.

The Cultural and Artistic Project

Four competitive and three non-competitive sections, installations and exhibitions, thousands of short films registered and an average of one hundred and fifty screened annually. The festival brings guests, seminars, meetings to the hamlet, to the little streets, ruins and the houses refurbished to host cultural events. This is a unique event, because the ghost hamlet which housesthe festival is shaped by it and, in turn shapes it, thanks to the projectors, the sound of the wind, the words of the great authors who teach cinema here, with the ghosts that inhabit the place.
Just try to imagine a village that is all one with its festival, where every tree, every prickly pear, every rock speaks to you like a short film. The organisers of the festival seek to contribute responsibly to a kind of enhancement that looks to the future the new film generations.
Five are the fingers of the hamlet. And five are the features that characterise our festival:
1) Quality. Too often cinema aims at quantity, speed and marketability to the detriment of creativity, the urge to express ideas, artistic innovation. Here in Pentedattilo there is no hurry, a strenuous climb takes you to the hamlet and you need to stop to get your breath back. Do not be afraid to show sweaty hands: it is with these that we promote films.
2) Youthful energy. Once upon a time there was a ghost town. Then came ideas and then others, ideas that burgeoned, year after year, until they produced a unique, solid shock wave, which continues to expand thanks to our energy and our desire to act.
3) Eco-sustainability. Ours is an oasis that seeks to combat the desertification of culture, the landscape and society. Take off your shoes and feel the hamlet speak to you through your body, you lie down on the ground to watch the shorts and, in the heart of the night, shift your gaze from the screen a moment and take a look at the night sky: the stars are there, watching the film with us.
4) Sharing. From seminars to meetings, from the hostel to the square, the festival should not be enjoyed alone, but as a community, a lively and increasingly diverse community, which, year after year, invades spaces and takes breath away. The heart of the Pentedattilo festival are the filmmakers, authors, guests and audiences, whose hearts beat in unison, bringing the hamlet back to life, and every year a piece of our heart remains behind, we leave it in the hamlet, in the streets to keep warm it warm until we return.
5) Recovery. That is our aim. First of all, the hamlet, its houses, its open spaces, the walls of its castle. Recovery of quality cinema, too often hushed; a new kind of cinema necessary for the future; a worldwide cinema taking its very first steps, coming to grips with the imperfections of creativity; a cinema that is not merchandise but art seeking to interpret the reality, unhinging it in a quest for truth; a cinema that makes you think, even when you laugh out loud; a cinema that remains in the mind’s eye, transforming the soul; the kind of cinema we cannot watch inside the confines of those little boxes we call home, but which we decide to see having travelled for miles, a journey that reminds us of our natural bent for wanderlust. We need to recover our spirit, lost in the traffic and bustle of the everyday, crushed by routine and by those who endeavour to dull our wits day after day. We need to recover the desire to act, talk, discuss ideas, in order to understand each other. We need to recover spontaneity, laughter, sincere anger and, in the evening, not be ashamed to sleep on the shoulder of a stranger.

For further information visit: http://www.pentedattilofilmfestival.net/index.html