The 9th edition of Life After Oil International Festival had been physically held in Villanovaforru, Sardinia, and wrapped at the Closing Ceremony Saturday September 24, after four intense days of free films, guests, music, good food sports and a five-a-side football tournament. The Jury formed by journalists and industry members and a special Jury composed by Fridays for Future, UniCa LGBT from University of Cagliari, the Villanovaforru's Reception Centre for asylum seekers (ERC) and the Institute of Higher Education Sanluri Vignarelli Audience, announced the award winners at the Ceremony.
Problems related to the use of fossil fuels and possible alternatives. Denounces against all types of exploitation and the stories of hope for a fairer world. Life After Oil, is the only film festival in Sardinia that specifically deals with issues relating to the environment and human rights at an international level. Conceived and directed by Massimiliano Mazzotta, the event has increasingly become an important opportunity of dialogue for filmmakers, activists, and associations of various nationalities that want to discuss energy issues and the search for a more sustainable lifestyle that is right for everyone.
A total of 1,541 works had been submitted, considerably more than last year, a demonstration of the growth of the festival. Many of them are first works, confirming how much Life After Oil continues to take into consideration and promote young directors and not just the best known and most successful authors.
But let's have a look at the Asian movies and movies about Asia, included the “palmarès”:
“Valentina Pedicini” Award Best Human Rights Feature and Medium Length Movie
FEMININITY by Mohsen Ostad Ali – Documentary – Iran 2020
For the intense yet discreet gaze with which the author manages to capture the humanity enclosed in each story, pursuing his own idea of cinema without renouncing rigour. A work that does not allow room for easy sentimentalism while telling highly emotional stories, capable of pursuing its own style and visual coherence while maintaining authenticity and naturalness.
Special mention by MEDICINA DEMOCRATICA – Best Movie Category
TRICKED INTO SURGERY: INDIA'S HYSTERECTOMY SCANDAL
by Mathilde Cusin – Documentary – France 2021
Attentively and carefully shot, Tricked into surgery exposes the scandal of the mass hysterectomy practised unnecessarily on female workers, even very young ones, on sugar cane farms in westcentral India. The film reveals the abuse of the female body perpetrated for profit by owners reluctant to employ fertile women at risk from the toxic substances they come into contact with during their work. It is a precise ‘anthropological' documentation of how, still in the third millennium, industrial practices in collusion with a corrupt medical establishment can prevail through deception over the well-being and bodies of entire economically and culturally subjugated populations.
Best Environmental Short Movie
VADIYAR by Marjan Khosravi – Fiction – Iran 2021
A short film whose cinematography succeeds in emphasising the incredible landscapes in which it is set, taking us to a seemingly distant world that, between isolation and tradition, is a full part of the various forms of contemporaneity in which we live. Khosravi uses the cinematic medium with remarkable awareness. The composition of the framing is almost pictorial, and it is colour that acts as the main medium of narration and atmosphere. The story is an animalistic fairy tale, which, however, does not shy away from outlining a lucid social analysis with a few strokes. The small town where the protagonist lives is in fact governed by a patriarchal regime, as well as implicit laws based on superstition and violence, to the detriment of weak parties such as women, children and animals. Sensitive and attentive is the portrayal of a childhood that is already blossoming into adolescence, and which elaborates its forms of resistance from its relationship with the environment. A fully successful staging of the clash between humanity and nature, which poses a fundamental question: is this conflict really necessary? Where is the boundary between the survival of the species and man's urge to dominate – and often destroy – the surrounding
ecosystem?
Special mention by ITALIA NOSTRA – Short Movie Category
SENTIENCE by Elliot J. Spencer – Documentary – Australia 2021
This short film, with fascinating sequences and evocative music, succeeds in conveying the vacuity to which we are forced (voluntarily or not) every day, absorbed by our smartphones, and the loss of awareness of nature that escapes before our eyes, more than the use of dialogue and collective warnings would have done. It depicts the harrowing reality of the mere illusion of our times, of being able to truly exist only through an illusory filter of sharing, of physical but not emotional presence. A short film that deliberately and with rhetorical force interweaves the tale of a perhaps archaic and distant world with the universe of today's digital communications, showing the limits and contradictions of both. Impeccable cinematography and narrative weaving succeed in the ambitious operation of showing us how these two worlds, seemingly distant, are actually two sides of the same coin, and how they fully constitute one of the many declinations of the contemporary global era.
Best Experimental Movie
AWAKENING OF THE GODDESS by Debjani Mukherjee – Documentary – India 2020
Because of the subject matter. We contest the trafficking of women because the emancipation of society is not possible without an honest and respectful integration of women. Give everyone a choice.
Best Movie WORLD PANORAMA
APARAT by Hasan Najmabadi – Fiction – Iran 2021
For its message. It makes one realise that in life one must also make sacrifices for whatever one wants. In this case, the boys set to work to realise a dream: watching the Italian classic ‘Cinema Paradiso'.
More about LAO, on the Official Website HERE
