The award, the Murano glass drop made by master Simone Cenedese, contains this year’s land of Rachel Carson’s birthplace in Springdale, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
“There were two titles that represented the values and mission of this award”: with these words the jury of honor chaired by Simone Gialdini, director general ANEC – Associazione Nazionale Esercenti Cinema, announced the winners of this edition.
Vermiglio for having represented, with poetic echoes that recall the cinema of Ermanno Olmi, a rural world that lives according to the rhythm of the seasons marked by nature, giving life to a narrative that, in addition to recovering memories and values of a peasant society that has now disappeared, becomes a significant apologue on modernity. A work in which the mountains are the background of every shot until they become as much protagonists as the performers, and describing a landscape that is rapidly changing before our eyes today, right in Trentino, with disappearing glaciers, forests felled by storms and dried up by bark beetle.
A film production, finally, which, it is worth pointing out, combines the ethical tension of storytelling with the technical and technological one of breaking down its impacts and certifying the sustainability of each process, respecting the environment and future generations.
Ainda Estou Aqui because it unites the underlying theme of civic resilience, with the protagonist’s journey as a civil rights activist-in the same years in which Brazil witnesses, for example, the campaign to perimeter the territories of the Amazon rainforest – reaffirming once again, how the values that concern humanity are never distant and cannot be separated from a process of democratic growth and in general how human ethics is the only way to save our planet.
The Green Drop Award given to the film “Vermilion” was collected by Francesca Andreoli, producer of the film, this morning at the Hotel Excelsior, at the Cinematograph Terrace:
<<This award, for me, has a special meaning because it is the first award received by “Vermiglio” which represents the first film produced by Cinedora, my new production company that I founded a few years ago with my partners Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli, Santiago Fondevila and Maura Delpero. This first award to “Vermiglio” makes me realize that we are on the right path and that we will certainly try to follow, even in future films, in the years to come.
“Vermilion” was a productively very stimulating project, but also very challenging to respect the time cycle of the story that the director (Maura Delpero) wanted to tell, we decided to really shoot over the course of the four seasons: in this way we showed the internal life cycle of the passage of time and the seasons of the place. The place is the protagonist of this story, the mountains remind man how small he is after all compared to the immensity of nature, a nature that we must strive more and more to preserve and respect, and in this the environmental mobility protocols that have been studied and implemented in recent years have finally become a very important and indispensable tool for the film and audiovisual industry.
The quality of Maura Delpero’s film, what enthusiastically convinced us to produce it, is that it tells a very intimate and personal story, it tells the story of her family, of her country of origin, but it tells it by expressing and describing emotions that we think can be universal and shareable by all of us. This union of the particular and the universal seemed to us a very important quality of the film that deserved to be produced and become a film.>>
The Green Drop Award, created in 2012, is the collateral prize that Green Cross – the organization founded more than 30 years ago by Nobel Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev and introduced in Italy by another Nobel Laureate, Professor Rita Levi Montalcini – assigns to the film, among those competing in the Festival’s official selection, that best interprets the values of ecology, sustainable development and cooperation among peoples. The Green Drop Award is not only an award for artistic merit but also an acknowledgement that aims to point out to the public, the press, teachers in schools and young people those works that help to reflect and raise our awareness in order to get out of the ecological crisis.
The winners were nominated by the Jury of Honor composed of Simone Gialdini (jury president), general manager of Associazione Nazionale Esercenti Cinema (ANEC); Giuliana Fantoni, president Federazione Cinema d’Essai – Fice; Carlo Giupponi, professor of Environmental and Applied Economics at the Department of Economics, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Patrizia Lombardi, pro-chancellor of the Polytechnic University of Turin and president of the Network of Universities for Sustainable Development – RUS; and Bepi Vigna, Italian cartoonist, writer and director, who has already won a Green Drop Award (for the short film “Nausicaa” in 2017).
