In the early 90's, thousands of DJs gave voice to a new generation of musicians, choosing extracts from the big amount of songs and sounds and putting them together. Today a new generation of filmmakers can contribute to find new meanings and stories to be told out of the ocean of contents produced by humans everyday.
In July 2015, during the 22nd Capalbio International Film Festival (Italy) (see video) we gave life to a first experiment . A selection of 7 short films was screened in a section highlighting the life of different communities, as lone teenagers, elder people, isolated vagrants. All films gave in few minutes a deep, insight on new, creative way to tell moving stories based on thousand of hours of raw web footage, or on other sources as film/photos archives.
The Storyboomers brainstorming session with film experts and cross thinkers held at the end of the festival defined the potential of these artists’ powerful works: express the voices and stories hidden beyond the apparently insane flood of contents we humans are sharing everyday.What social usefulness they carry? How to make the world hear and listen to the most distant voices? The cinema has the great potential to unveil the social realities hidden behind the frame. Filmmakers and artist from all over the world are on the move.
The STORYBOOMERS neologism we have created names this particular generation of young artists and filmmakers diving day after day into the footage 2.0, and revolutionizing the concept of cinema du réel. Storyboomers concept had just trespassed the boundaries of the Festival. We decided to commit ourselves to outreach the unrevealed communities.
FEDERICO PONTIGGIA
CRITICAL AND JOURNALIST
Vertical lines that connect, diversify, stigmatise the New York that once was, the Barletta that is now and the work that doesn’t change and kills yesterday like today, while the fascination leaves to the scrapping of the look (Triangle): the Vestal virgins without the pantheon who break time and customs, and ask the elderly about their mothers and fathers (N-Capace). What do Costanza Quatriglio and Eleonora Danco present if not the reproduction of reality and the production of the senses, that which is invisible to the eye? and what storytelling, what narrative action do they pursue? We call it reality cinema 2.0, and it is that to which the make-up tutorials of the young Israeli girls aim for (True Colors), as well as the man with the camera 2.0 (Go Pro), a.k.a. the bengalese vagrant who tells his story for love (Sexy Shopping), the bear who takes the photographic and ontological place of a by-gone grandfather (Bär). What does it mean to tell a story today about a reality that has more and more media coverage if not to reject the intermediary, and welcome uncertainty?
LAURA DELLI COLLI
PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL FEDERATION ITALIAN FILM JOURNALISTS
There’s a red thread that this year binds, in the name of change, the research of the most attentive festivals to the new. The workshop that Capalbio launches this year in synergy with the Sundance Institute – the heart of this edition – becomes, symbolically, its final knot, uniting its tradition of attention to the language of the younger cinema to that sense of research, of scouting and discovery, that has marked in a special way the most recent steps of its journey.
The attention given to the festival this year by cinema journalists reflects first of all the curiosity for the special encounter on the new that its project proposes, in a moment when following new proposals (not in Italy but across the world and, above all, between screens and the web) finally seems like a feasible bet.
Storyboomers, digital born, selfie-movies? If we try to inflect in a more day to day language the key words of this edition, maybe in a more traditional and ‘ancient’ way we can say that this year Capalbio offers a journey without luggage towards a surprise destination, crossing, in just a few days, an Ocean towards a world that is a lot closer than how it has been always represented on the geographic map of cinema. With only one certainty for who has decided to share the journey: knowing that the arrival will be at sunrise, a sunrise of innovation and transversal languages beyond the normality of a cinema that has smelled of celluloid for over a century, and that has now the taste of a reality to tell. This reality is told with the glance of who, in a world where everyone films, takes pictures and tells stories, wants to win the bet of a future that has already begun: writing the small and great passions of tomorrow’s cinema with the apparently ‘coldest’ equipment that technology has given to us. Will it really be the case?