Lo schermo dell'arte 2024, 17th edition

Lo schermo dell’arte 17th Edition

Contemporary art and cinema festival

Florence, November 13 – 17, 2024

Cinema La Compagnia, Palazzo Strozzi, , NYU Florence , Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze

Streaming: Lo schermo dell’arte channel on MYmovies ONE
November 13 – 24, 2024

Free admission for those under 30

The first previews on the programme

The 17th edition of Lo schermo dell’arte will take place in Florence from November 13th to 17th, 2024.

The Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival, supported by Fondazione CR Firenze and part of the 50 Giorni di Cinema a Firenze programme, offers the public a selection of the most recent production of artists’ films and documentaries on contemporary art.
These explore themes such as gender identity, relationships with colonial history, the environment and the animal world, as well as the intersection of art and political power, through fiction, documentary, and the use of new technologies.

Cinema La Compagnia in Florence will once again be the heart of the Festival, serving not only as the venue for its intense screening programme, curated by Silvia Lucchesi and Valeria Mancinelli, which includes world, European, and Italian premieres with the presence of its authors, but also as a gathering place for artists, curators, and international guests.

This edition will also expand online with streaming of a selection of films (until November 24th, 2024) on the new permanent channel Lo schermo dell’arte on Mymovies ONE launched in July with films from previous editions of the Festival.

With the Under 30 Audience Award for the best film of the 17th edition, Lo schermo dell’arte reaffirms its focus on the younger audience, who will be able to have free access to screenings and actively participate in the Festival by voting for their favorite film through the Lo schermo dell’arte App.

Focus on Garrett Bradley

The 17th edition’s Focus is dedicated to American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley (New York 1986, lives in New Orleans). Her work is distinguished by a highly personal visual style through which she explores human conflicts and social injustices. Her feature film Time (2020), an epic love story and a strong critique of the American judicial system, was selected for competition at over 50 festivals, nominated for an Oscar, and won the Best Director Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, making Bradley the first Black woman in the festival’s history to win this award. Her solo exhibitions have been held at MoMA New York (2020) and MoCA Los Angeles (2022), among others. In 2023, she received the Eye Art & Film Prize from the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Garrett Bradley returns to the Festival with 5 works created between 2017 and 2023, including an episode from the Netflix miniseries Naomi Osaka, which documents the life of the renowned Japanese tennis player, a four-time Grand Slam champion, over two years. The artist will also hold a public talk at the Festival at New York University Florence.

Opening night: Wednesday, November 13

Opening Night with the performance Edge of Life by American artist, filmmaker, and writer John Menick, dedicated to new forms of cinema, as well as ghosts, zombies, the undead, and ‘digital resurrection.’ A narrative text voiced by the artist himself accompanies a montage of images from science fiction films, the history of cinema, computer graphics, and biological and folkloric research.
Following Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024), by Haitian director Raoul Peck, Oscar nominee for I’m Not Your Negro (2016). It tells the story of the South African photographer forced into exile in New York after the publication of his book House of Bondage (1967), a brave denunciation of the horrors of apartheid. The film reconstructs his life, also thanks to the discovery, in 2017, of 60,000 negatives considered lost, images that intensely capture the brutality of racial segregation in South Africa and the United States. The film won the Œil d’or for Best Documentary at the Cannes Film Festival.

Special event exergue - on documenta 14

Dimitris Athiridis spent two years documenting the preparation of documenta 14, filming the meetings and site visits of artistic director Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team. Titled Learning From Athens, the 2017 edition of what is considered the most important contemporary art exhibition in the world was held for the first time in Athens as well as in Kassel. Szymczyk’s curatorial and political choices led to a financial deficit followed by a media scandal, overshadowing the artistic merits of the exhibition. The film, in Italian premiere, with an extraordinary length of 14 hours, is an unprecedented exploration of the behind-the-scenes world of institutional contemporary art. Composed of 14 chapters of approximately one hour each, it will be presented at Palazzo Strozzi, in the Strozzina spaces, in collaboration with Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, throughout the duration of the Festival. Adam Szymczyk will have a conversation with Salvatore Lacagnina, curator and co-creator of the Studio14 programme for Athens documenta 14.

Among the films in the programme

Among the artists’ films are Lolo & Sosaku The Western Archive (2024), a personal reimagining of the Western genre through fiction, documentary, and auteur cinema by the versatile Spanish artist Sergio Caballero, director of the Sónar Advanced Music and Multimedia Art Festival; The Invisible Worm (2024) by Anglo-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi, exploring the friendship between two women artists, the author herself and Danish sculptor Marie Lund; The Book of Flowers (2023) by Polish artist Agnieszka Polska, where visual compositions of flowers come to life through AI and animation; and Diego Marcon with his recent La Gola (2024), an epistolary narrative between two characters, Gianni and Rossana, hyper-realistic dolls animated digitally, which innovatively explores visual storytelling in melodrama.

Among the documentaries are the European premiere of Art of Diplomacy (2023) by Brazilian director Zeca Brito, which reconstructs a fascinating story of cultural diplomacy involving Brazilian modernist art during World War II, and Arte Povera, Appunti per la Storia (2023) by Andrea Bettinetti, which examines the disruptive power of a movement and a group of young artists who have made a significant impact on the contemporary art scene, in Italy and beyond.

VISIO 2024

VISIO – European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi and dedicated to artists under 35 who use moving images, reaches its 13th edition this year. It confirms its support for the production of new works by young artists through the VISIO Production Fund, worth €35,000 and financed in partnership with Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato), Fondazione In Between Art Film (Rome) and FRAC Bretagne (Rennes). Thanks to the support of Human Company, a historic company and a leading name in openair hospitality in Italy, the VISIO Production Fund 2024 has been increased by €5,000 and, for the first time, will include a reimbursement for the travel expenses of participating artists. This year, 153 applications (+20%) were received from 53 different countries (+18%), including Armenia, Australia, Benin, Brazil, China, Colombia, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Senegal, Singapore, the United States, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turkey. The eight selected artists will be announced in September 2024. The Festival programme includes the world premieres of works by Andro Eradze, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno, and Valentin Noujaïm, created with the support of the VISIO Production Fund 2023. Also Razeh-del (2024) by Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory, produced with the Visio Production Fund 2022, will have its Italian premiere at the festival. The film was selected in the Locarno Film Festival’s Pardi di domani competition, and will be screened at the 68th BFI London Film Festival and the 62nd New York Film Festival, among others. This collage work uses poetry, documentary and archival materials to tell the story of two Iranian students’ desire, in 1998, to make an impossible film under the theocratic regime.