And everybody’s laughing… the funniest comedies from Africa, Asia and Latin America
Selected in collaboration with  Gino and Michele of Zelig.
Following the success with the public and press last year, we are once again offering a section of the funniest and most scathing comedies of recent production from the three continents. To select them, we asked Gino and Michele, the founders of Zelig and the hotbed par excellence  of comedy in Italy, for their collaboration. With the birth throughout Africa of a more popular cinema, produced and distributed in video following the success of the Nigerian phenomenon of Nollywood, the genre of comedy as films of entertainment, but also as keen analysis and social catharsis, is beginning to develop. The genre is also gaining great popular success in Asia and in Latin America. To give voice to this new trend and also to give dignity to a genre that film criticism has always ignored, last year the festival created a new section dedicated to the laughter in the world. The selection only addresses films for the cinema, excluding for the time being the enormous production of comic series for TV which would form a chapter on their own. We are therefore avoiding comedy which is too standardized to present, as always, cinema of quality which stands out by the originality of its approach and creativity.

Digital shadows:  the new generation of Chinese films

A selection of films with their national premiere from the retrospective "Sombras digitales" presented in September 2011 at the Festival Internacional de Cine de Donostia - San Sebastian, by Bérénice Reynaud.
In Chinese culture, the expression “electric shadows" ("Dian Ying") refers to the art of the cinema. Today, the electricity of those first projectors has largely been replaced by digital video, through which a generation of new filmmakers have become the witnesses of a rapidly transforming society. Not only because the luminosity and the mobility of the new shooting equipment allows filming daily life in interiors and in places of difficult access, but because it puts an end to the conception of the central position of studios which had become the norm following the Maoist nationalization of the film industry. In recent years, Chinese independent cinema has thus undergone a rapid development with the passage from film to bytes. With digital technology, filmmakers have become more daring in exploring their country with films that are hybrids between fiction and documentary. In this section, we have selected 10 films made using digital technology in the years 2000-2010. Thanks to a plurality of points of view and approaches, the titles in this retrospective show us the reality of China today, going far beyond mere nostalgia or simple social protest. Let yourselves be carried away by the multiple forms of new Chinese digital cinema to set off on a surprising journey in the Other China, the unassimilated and irrepressible vitality of its people: the cultural, linguistic and architectural diversity, the great discrepancy between the city and the countryside, between the nouveaux riches and the eternally poor, the ambivalent embrace of modernity, the bitter disputes with landowners, property speculation and chattiness, in short all those aspects that for some time now have replaced the hackneyed stereotype of the stoic peasant or the child bride.