Young professional and non-professional film-makers of any nationality, aged between 18 and 35, can compete for the Prize through a public call for applications: just submit the project of a short film, with a maximum duration of 15 minutes, which includes the use, even partial, of the film material of the Aamod Foundation, the partner archives or other archives. Among the projects received, a jury composed of five important personalities of Italian cinema chooses nine finalists, whose authors have the opportunity to participate in a training and development course conducted by established professionals. This course includes 48 hours of training and, for each project, 12 hours of individual tutoring in the presence and 12 hours of individual remote tutoring. At the end, there will be a pitch with the Jury, in which the finalist authors present the development dossier and the teaser of their project. The Jury then selects three winning projects from among the finalists who, in addition to freely using the film material of Aamod and the partner archives, receive free support services for the production of the short films and the sum of 2,000 euros for each project.
For documentary short film projects there are no thematic, genre, format or fruition constraints: on the contrary, the initiative intends to stimulate and reward originality, experimentation, even the “betrayal” or the remixing of genres, in particular in the reuse of archive cinema. It is no coincidence that it is named after Cesare Zavattini (writer, screenwriter, director, journalist, painter, cultural animator), one of the fathers of Italian neorealism, but also a tireless supporter of cinema as a free, multifaceted, creative, irreverent instrument of knowledge of reality in The Prize avails itself of a Committee of Guarantors, chaired by Arturo Zavattini and made up of representatives of all the institutions that contribute to its realization. It is promoted by the Audiovisual Archive Foundation of the Labor and Democratic Movement (Aamod) as part of the UnArchive project (IT “command”, which can be translated as “extract from an archive”), with which it intends to experiment with paths of maximum openness to knowledge, and the reuse of film heritage, through the adoption of open licenses and the enhancement of the opportunities offered by the Web.
The Cesare Zavattini Prize is an initiative promoted by the Audiovisual Archive Foundation of the Labor and Democratic Movement, supported by the Ministry of Culture – Cinema Direction, by the Lazio Region, by the Istituto Luce Cinecittà and by Nuovo Imaie, with the partnership of Home Movies and the collaboration of the Cineteca Sarda, of the Archive of Migrant Memories, of the Bookciak Action! Award, of Deriva Film and Officina Visioni, of UCCA and FICC. Media partner: Radio Radicale and Diari di Cineclub.
