ECCO, È ORA

curated by Giulietta Fara

Our Circus celebrates four years of age right on the sixtieth anniversary of the Pesaro Film Festival. It’s like a young grandchild born during the pandemic, when everyone, and especially children, needed to be together and find new ways to do that. The generation most involved in Circus is the one that risked not being able to see the films in a movie theatre along with other children and remain trapped in streaming platforms. During these four years, a new spectatorship has taken shape and animation film has imposed itself in international film festivals, while small independent films have managed to reach the big screens in our country too. Helping these films to circulate and the little big cinephiles to grow up is the PFF Circus’s project. So 2024 is for our Circus a little anniversary in which we begin to get big.
This year, the Pesaro Film Festival’s proposal for children replicates the successful format of screenings and workshops, in a synergy with the year of Pesaro Italian Capital of Culture which falls precisely in 2024. For its promotion, with an ironic and timeless style, the town relies on the masterly hands of the children along with film animator Piero Tonin and the extraordinary participation of Manfredo Manfredi. Together, they will create an actual Carosello theme.
Alma – the Associazione Libera Marchigiana Animatori – with whom the PFF Circus has strengthened bonds, is also crucial in this strategy. On one hand, Alma’s Giulia Betti will work with children on the promotion of Gioachino Rossini through his opera La gazza ladra and Emanuele Luzzati’s masterpiece cartoon with the same title which dates back precisely to sixty years ago. Giulia and the budding filmmakers will also try their hand at the promotion of the Pesaro Film Festival, with period images and photographs.
On the other hand, Alma Animatori brings into our Circus a collection of little animated gems that will be shown by the filmmakers themselves, telling how they came up with the stories and drawings and how unexpected movements influenced the creative process.
The screenings proposed by PFF Circus have the goal of stimulating the future cinephiles with unreleased or lesser-known works, animation styles, and stories that make them travel through unknown and fantastic lands.
Besides the Alma shorts, screenings include Sky Cinema’s 10 Lives by Christopher Jenkins, N-Wave Studios’ The Inseparables by Jérémie Degruson, then Wanted Cinema’s Rosa and the Stone Troll by Karla Nor Holmbäck, and KinoLogy’s Sirocco et le Royaume des courants d'air by Benoît Chieux. All of them compete for the Audience Award assigned by the jury of children present in the cinema.
Different animation techniques are used in each film: traditional bidimensional animation and 3-D digital animation contribute to the stories and characters, whether simple or painstakingly defined, as well as settings featuring block-colour backgrounds or minutely detailed landscapes.
The characters are frozen in their stories, but ready to get out of them: from the bear waking up from lethargy to the stone troll, from an animated puppet to a spoiled cat, from a lord of the winds and storms to a skating girl, from animated flowers and seeds to a super-fast biker.
The Pesaro Film Festival Circus is like a world tour that in 2024 takes its little seafarers to Great Britain, Canada, Italy, France Spain, Denmark, and Luxembourg.
A world tour that is a carousel of experiences and emotions.