The Villa Medici Film Festival is back for its second edition from September 14th-18th. Presented by the French Academy in Rome and first held in 2021, the Villa Medici Film Festival explores the ever-closer connections between cinema and contemporary art and sets out to discover new styles of film.
For this year’s second edition in Rome, the Festival is fostering its role as a pioneer by encouraging the convergence of works with diverse profiles that question, disrupt, divert or enchant the viewer’s relationship with images. Since its first being established, the Festival has brought a community of authors and film lovers together at Villa Medici to promote collective thinking regarding cinema and its evolution. Artists, filmmakers, and academics from all continents will meet in September at Villa Medici to celebrate the vitality of contemporary film practices through a selection of proposals – films by authors, essays, works of fiction, or documentaries – that stand out for the singularity of their subject matter or form.
On the Program for the Villa Medici Film Festival 2022
Just as last year, the Festival is split into three parts: the International competition with around fifteen contemporary films of all genres and lengths; the parallel “Focus” program with films by out-of-competition artists, masterclasses, and exceptional encounters; and the great Piazzale evenings which bring together all kinds of viewers for outdoor screenings of previously unseen films, with a host of previews as well as classic films screened in their restored versions.
From the uneasy effervescence of the movement for freedom in Hong Kong filmed from inside the Polytechnic University (Inside the Red Brick Wall by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers collective, Prize Villa Medici for Best Film awarded by Béla Tarr, Mati Diop, and Teresa Castro) to the realities of Bolivian mines (El Gran Movimiento by Kiro Russo, Jury Prize 2021), the competition of this second edition of the Festival will offer new incursions into worlds near and far that shed light on contemporary issues.
The Festival’s Selection Committee
Each year the Villa Medici Film Festival appoints a selection committee to choose the films in competition according to an approach that is as open as possible to the diversity of practices, forging unexpected links between disciplines and authors, whether they be filmmakers, plastic artists, or visual artists.
For this second edition, the selection committee is made up of Leonardo Bigazzi – curator of the Festival Lo Schermo dell’Arte and VISIO European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images, Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou – exhibition curator, film festival programmer (Semaine de la Critique – Cannes Festival, Marrakech International Film Festival) and researcher who teaches at the HEAD in Geneva, Mathilde Henrot – organizer of online and in-theatre film festivals including the Sarajevo and Locarno film festivals as well as founder of the websites Festival Scope and Festival Scope Pro, and Lili Hinstin – artistic director of Villa Medici and the Belfort and Locarno Film Festivals and programmer for the Cinéma du Réel.
The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici
Founded in 1666 by Louis XIV, the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici is a French institution based on Mount Pincio at the 16th century Villa Médici since 1803. A national public institution under the authority of the Ministry of Culture, The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici today performs three complementary functions: to welcome high-level artists, creators, and art historians in residence for stays of one year or less; to set up a cultural and artistic program integrating all the fields of the arts and creation aimed at a broad audience; and to conserve, restore, study and inform the public about its heritage as well as its collections.
Since 1974, the French Academy in Rome has been hosting Fellows scriptwriters and visual artists who make films; and for the past two decades has worked to promote the history and creation of films with programs like Cinemondo, Re | visioni, and Cinema all’aperto.