We are looking forward to having La Città dell’Utopia International Film Festival back for the second edition in june 2025!
Last year, La Città dell’Utopia International Film Festival was established as a way to discover young independent filmmakers and offer them a platform. We want this festival to be a place for filmmakers and film lovers to meet, share, and collaborate. Like last year, we will not try to find a “winner” but our main goal is to open conversations, to offer an exchange between the filmmakers. Our focus will always be on the main idea behind cinema: interaction. We invite all finalists to come to La Città dell’Utopia and offer them a stay in our social hostel during the festival. We hope to create a chance for filmmakers and the audience to connect and to open the door for future collaborations.
This festival aims to centralize and offer a platform to the various voices of independent and low budget filmmakers from all around the world. We particularly embrace the filmmaker’s distinctive, bold, and less commonly observed approach that separates from mainstream conventions. Like the name of our organisation, we attempt to embody this hopeful spirit through filmmaking. Like this, we attempt to contribute to the continuous effort to push the boundaries of the accepted norm and the never-ending struggle to evolve and develop in our world.
We are thrilled to announce the Finalists and the Official Selection for the second edition of the festival! The movies of the finalists will be screened during our open-air festival, from the 26th to the 29th of June, at La Città dell’Utopia. This social lab is located in the neigborhood San Paolo, in the south of Rome and our main objective is to offer an experimental path of active citizenship with the hope to develop and reinforce a contant dialectec between the local and international dimension.
And now, the finalists and our official selection!
Short Fiction:
Finalists:
- Strange Bird, Achille Balthazar, Belgium
- The Contact, Mert Erez, Türkiye
- Insomnia Coffee, Samy Guémar, France
- Blanchette and the Eight Cents, Valentin Homont, France
- Kiddo, Daria Kapliy, Russia
- Varasteegi, Mahdi Mousazade, Iran
- Il criaturo sintetico, Sarah Narducci, Italy
- The Ballad of Jimmy Hard, Máté S. Papp, Hungary
- Dieci Secondi, Roberta Palmieri, Italy
- ZAPOVIT, Anton Proza, Ukraine
Official Selection:
- Brother’s Horn, Majid Asadi, Iran
- Connection, Zhandos Dzholdoshov, Kyrgyzstan
- The other lives, Nicolò Folin, Italy
- I have been dead for five days, Omar Arteaga Giraldo, Venezuela
- The high Shepherd, Amir Golshani, Iran
- Vaziyet, Ufuk Gürbüzdal, Türkiye
- It’s about time!, Valerio Manisi, Italy
- The Fog, Phinn Sallin-Mason, Switzerland
- Hooves beat, Fargol Masrourirad, Seyed Hossein Zeitoonnejad, Iran
- T.I.N.A., Marco Mazzone, Italy
- Now and then, Iván Melguizo, Spain
- Mourning, Armin Mohammadi, Iran
- Tadpoles, Isabel Rosó Monche, Spain
- Behind the night, Soroush Nejadazar, Iran
- Surveillant, Alexandre Popov, France
- Miss Postura, Luca Turco, Italy
- The Red Carpet, Burak Varlık, Türkey
- The spring never returns, Siwei Yu, China
Experimental:
Finalists:
- In Between City, Ilya Kreines, Czechia
- Walk around the garden, Lucía Lippl, Argentina
- Neva, Elizaveta Zharikova, Russia
Official Selection:
- The Providence of Becoming, Anthony Abduh, Lebanon
- Waiting and Depression, Ekrem Cigir, Türkiye
- Lupus In Fabula, Elia Costi, Italy
- Two, Nikita Lubinickiy, Russia
- Maharaja’s Parent of Rice, Eka Lutfi Febriyantono, Indonesia
- Prayer, Haroldo Saboia, Brazil
Documentary:
Finalists:
- From where a name becomes memory, Paola Espinoza, Ecuador
- Shattered Memory, Hayat Labban, Palestine
- One breath partial but complete, Lorenzo Spinelli, Italy
- The tribe, Sasha Stanislavovich Koz’ma, Russia
- Maryam, Elnaz Zhalehchin, Iran
Official Selection:
- Mawtini, Marianne Barakat, Lebanon
- THE KEEP, Federico Conti, Italy
- Pink Moon, Meray Diner, Cyprus, Türkiye, United Kingdom
- Goodbye Götz, Shyam Lukas Jones, Austria
- Todo lo cubre la sal, Joana Moya, Spain
- No Other Way, Irina Pivtoratcaia, Moldova, Russia
- Your humble servant, Marta Terribile, Estonia
- Aylin’s fairytales, Asel Asel Umaralieva, Kyrgyzstan
Animation:
Finalists:
- Snack time, Léa Buffard, Belgium
- Featherbrain, Paul Charff, France
- Maskdealer, Tim Große, Germany
- Journey in amnesia, Anouk Kilian-Debord, Belgium
- Machina Reverie, Lia Santelmo, Portugal
Official Selection:
- When the snow will fall, Ekaterina Asrieva, Russia
- Pinea, Eirik Heggen, Norway
- Pingu & Bear, Kai-Anne Opperman, Germany
- CheckMates, Cler Reizale, Brazil
- In Our Hands, Camillo Sancisi, Italy
- A Shadowy Store(y), Houman Tehrani Sharif, Iran
- The Nature of the River, Agnieszka Waszczeniuk, Poland
Thank you all for participating in our festival! We are looking forward to hosting and screening the finalists in Rome and we can’t wait to see all of you at the festival!
