TUESDAY, 4 JUNE
MOLE ANTONELLIANA
7:00 PM
Entrance by invitation only.
The Festival’s annual Stella della Mole award, formerly Movies Save the Planet, is given in recognition of an artist whose cinematographic work deals with the environment and nature. This year CinemAmbiente pays homage to Bruno Bozzetto, a master of animated cinema, whose most recent title Sapiens? will be shown, along with a selection of shorts from his long list of titles.
“Ecology is like education… everybody talks about it but no one puts it into practice,” thus Signor Rossi comments on a sad state of affairs in one of numerous vignettes created during the COVID-19 lockdown and recently published in the collection entitled Attenti all’uomo (Gallucci, 2023). With irony and wit, Bozzetto portrays the relationship between man, animals, and nature and his decision to take up the cause of animal protection.
Drawn in minimalist style, new and old characters like sweet Doggie give voice to their feelings, their disappointment and anger and evoke empathy and respect. The typical minimalist style of a free hand and concise content, together with a subtle yet surprising sense of humor, have been Bozzetto’s hallmarks since the late 1950s to today in over 300 film productions, including shorts, features, commercials, TV logos, and educational films, plus over 130 awards, including the Winsor McCay award, five Nastri d’Argento, an honorary degree, 15 career awards, an Oscar nomination, and a Golden Bear at the Berlinale.
Designer, director, animator, and artist gifted with endless professional curiosity and ability to convey enthusiasm and plain wisdom, he is an avid mountain hiker. He has a keen ear for listening and an eye for observing his surroundings. These abilities influence his work: ideas take form in innumerable animated stories about various topics, like the life of insects, the destruction of wars, the alienation of modern life, and man’s difficulty in finding harmony and heightened awareness. This is why ecology and defense of the environment hold such a prominent place in his work, a sort of album that explores the role of humans and human behavior. With extraordinary immediacy appealing to adults and children, his ironic wit captures the contradictions of human nature, revealing the inability to learn from one’s error. The evolution of weapons, from prehistorical slings to the atomic bombs of the 20th century, is retold in his debut short Tapum! La storia delle armi (1958) and continues with Cavallette (1990), a bitter yet humous account of human self-destructiveness over time. Signor Rossi, the average man with a red hat and moustache, who originated as a character in the 1960s, goes through misadventures and experiences mass tourism, which will eventually become one of present day’s most serious environmental problems. Now there is Sapiens? A sort of summary of Bozzetto’s creative work. Three episodes sharing a common denominator which humans apparently cannot overcome: domination over the environment and over everything other than oneself.
