Simone Massi wins the Cinema dell’Anima award

The 25th ShorTS International Film Festival (Trieste, 28 June – 6 July 2024) is to award the truly special Cinema dell’Anima prize to animator Simone Massi. The awarding of the prize, scheduled for Friday 28 June at the Giardino Pubblico, is to be preceded by a masterclass by the director curated by Maurizio di Rienzo (artistic director ShorTS IFF), and backed by the screening of Tengo la posizione (Italy, 2001), Io so chi sono (Italy, 2004) and Dell’ammazzare il maiale (Italy, 2011) – three shorts tracing the career of an independent animator-director who stands out for his peculiar dramaturgic-expressive technique. This will be followed, again at the Giardino Pubblico in Trieste, by the screening of Invelle (Italy, 2023), the Marche filmmaker’s first feature film presented last year in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival and to be released in the coming months, distributed by Lucky Red.

Maurizio di Rienzo explained the awarding of the Cinema dell’Anima prize as follows: “An enduring artistic spirit, a narrator of stories that are as territorial and ethically his own as they are universal, capable of developing a special art of dramatic drawing, evocative and imaginative yet deeply realistic. The past narrated to him of his native Pergola, in the Pesaro area of the Marche, is grafted into the present of moving pictures, brim-full of farmworkers, the countryside, animals, children, women, amidst the seasons, wars, pacifications, in a distant place made up of familiar places that runs on tracks of memory and expectation, now and forever. This unprecedented Cinema dell’Anima prize that ShorTS 2024 is awarding to Simone Massi, a timeless artist, is truly a recognition ad personam.”