06/09/2021
Nice and short
by Wanda De Rosa
This year Giornate degli Autori and Miu Miu once again team up to present two new short films for the series Women's Tales, along with the customary talk series moderated by Penny Martin. It's an occasion for some of the most interesting female filmmakers on the international scene to share their thoughts about filmmaking today. The new entries for 2021 are Isabel Sandoval and Kaouther Ben Hania, directors, respectively of short #21, Shangri-La, and #22, I and the Stupid Boy.
With Penny Martin moderating the event, yesterday morning the two women filmmakers launched into an inspired conversation about the cinematic art. Although they had the outfits from Miu Miu's latest collection at their disposal, the brand granted the directors ample leeway in creating two different and very personal works.
Sandoval, born and raised in the Philippines, "aestheticizes" issues such as immigration, the LGBTQ+ community, and racial discrimination in Shangri-La. The short recreates the intimate atmosphere of a confessional and becomes a fantastical journey into a woman's unconscious, in which she sees herself as a warrior and a lodestar, freed from constraints.
Tunisian filmmaker Ben Hania, in I and the Stupid Boy, has drawn on pop culture to craft a tale of two young lovers that looks at the ills of social media in terms of control and domestic violence. Miu Miu gave Ben Hania the opportunity to explore the short format as a way to experiment with making a film that features "not one but three styles". In fact, I and the Stupid Boy starts out as a romantic comedy, proceeds in documentary mode, and culminates in the horror genre.
Both Sandoval and Ben Hania said they were enthusiastic about this collaboration, due to the greater freedom they had making shorts as opposed to feature-length films.
