The opening day of Giornate degli Autori sees a new "silk road" - that ancient tradition of brotherhood between Venice and the East - spring to life, as the debut film by Chen Guan, Shen Kong, kicks off the official selection. Venetian Nights starts the ball rolling with the new film by Andrea Segre, a Giornate veteran and one of Italy's most acclaimed and prolific filmmakers, who made his feature debut here at Giornate with Shun Li and the Poet ten years ago. That film spun a universe between Chioggia and China. This one, emblematically titled Welcome Venice, is a story of fraternity that is Venetian and universal at once. It premieres at our brand-new venue, the Sala Laguna.

Giornate inaugurates its Official Selection and Venetian Nights, the section co-curated with Isola Edipo, with two films that are very different, and not just for geographical reasons. What they have in common is a sense of urgency: the need to tell stories in which the protagonists inhabit and move through a changing landscape that transforms them as well. Chen Guan takes on love in the Covid era in his first feature film Shen Kong (in competition), a lyrical look at the erotic and romantic impulses of two young people in the eerie setting of a city emptied out in the wake of the tragedy that struck a year and a half ago. Welcome Venice by Andrea Segre (Venetian Nights - Sala Laguna) is a film immersed in the canals and the lagoon of a Venice that is also semi-deserted, with tourists gingerly coming back post-lockdown.

"In a lineup in which cinema looks at the world from a political angle," declares Gaia Furrer, "this independent film, shot in an unidentified Chinese city - still and silent, empty due to the quarantine, the deserted backdrop to the playful if melancholic wanderings of two young lovers - seemed the right choice for us to make. Ten years after his sensational debut at Giornate with Shun Li and the Poet, this Venetian filmmaker is back to inaugurate our new venue with a film that is a portrait, fragile and potent at once, of a world torn between a need to protect its own roots and the opposite need to sell off precious parts of itself, key to its identity."