Beyond the limits, with passion: the eyes of the jurors constantly spark, scan and welcome. The Giffoni Jury panels are made up of young connoisseurs who are impatient to discover more stories, like the ones of #Giffoni50. Vibrant stories that give shape and substance to feelings ready to become precious memories. This is what you would expect from a Festival that thrives on cinema with total freedom. “Everything gets back into place, we come back to our place” and there are no words to describe what both the most necessary Festival and its participants have been achieving for the past fifty years. Under the same sky, watching films and choosing the most intense one, the one capable to stay where our heart beats at an ever-increasing pace. This first part of the Festival has been characterized by a passionate selection of films in competition in two main categories. Feature films and short films that have been selected among 4500 works from all over Europe, but also from Japan, South Korea, Iran, Canada and the United States.
It is Frieder’s fragility in AUERHOUSE (Germany) by Neele Leana Vollmar (in 2014 she presented THE PASTA DETECTIVES at Giffoni) that moved and conquered the hearts of the Generators+18. Four young friends – Höppner, Frieder, Vera and Cácilia – find, under the neighbours’ skeptical eyes – a flat to share that they name Auerhaus. The group find it terrible that their lives seem so planned. And they want to help Frieder, who hast suicide thoughts. After a short time Pauline, a pyromaniac, joins the group, she, like Frieder, was recently in a youth home. A strong story, about fragility and courage that focuses on the malaise of the soul. In the short films category, the Generators+18 chose REFLECTION (Spain) by Huan Carlos Mostaza: the story of Clara, a nine-year-old child, demanding and perfectionist. Despite her efforts and her many sacrifices, she gets a bad mark in PE. She embarks on a path full of obsessions and self-deceiving thoughts that will lead her to fall in a bottomless pit: anorexia.
The story of OUR LADY OF THE NILE (France, Belgium, Ruanda) by Atiq Rahimi won the Generators +16. It is a story about inclusion and adolescence in the journey back in time set in Ruanda, where the girls are sent to study at Our Lady of the Nile, a prestigious catholic college located on the top of a hill, to become the future élite of Rwanda. Their diploma as the main aim, the young girls share the same accommodation, the same dreams and the same worries of adolescence. But the deep-rooted antagonism between ethnic groups becomes more and more evident in the whole country and inside the school. As regards the short film section, the Generators +16 declared WILMA (Iceland) by Haukur Björgvinsson as the winner: a guy meets his father for the first time. The man lives in a trailer park and he does not know that his son perceives himself as a woman and goes by the name of Wilma.
