Filmmaker Expanded 2022 at MEET

FilmMakerFest is a festival created to bring international cinema to Milan and from the city to the rest of the world, always trying to remain open to new collaborations, voices and relationships between audience and theater.
They have always supported free and independent cinema from a formal and productive point of view, holding close that workshop component that has allowed them to support at least three generations of filmmakers.

From this year Filmmaker introduces the Filmmaker Expanded section dedicated to extended realities and born from the collaboration with the research group AN-ICON – An-Iconology: History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images at the University of Milan. AN-ICON is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (agreement number 834033). The project, hosted at the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” of the University of Milan, investigates from a theoretical, historical and operational point of view the identity of the images-environment that characterize extended reality media (virtual, augmented and mixed).

Since Virtual Reality and immersive environments have made their appearance within film festivals, it has become evident that many VR creators come from cinema or, at least, that they take into account, even subvert, cinematic devices of reproduction of reality. Less well known but perhaps even more interesting is that some experimenters in the cinema of the real have internalized the principles and expressive practices of immersivity and have been trying for some time now to render it in a form capable of convincingly evoking it within the frame. It could be said that the desire for another form forces the boundaries of the frame, at least as much as in 360 experiences the theoretical freedom of the gaze is subject to suggestions and conditioning.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, November 23 starting at 6:30 p.m. at IMMERSIVE REALITIES, a program of immersive images curated by the research group AN-ICON and Filmmaker Festival with the collaboration of MEET Digital Culture Center.

The aim of the collaboration between the AN-ICON research group, focused on XR media (University of Milan), and Filmmaker, a festival dedicated to cinema of the real and experimentation, is to translate this confrontation – fruitful in critical and theoretical terms – into a curatorial project organized with Meet Digital Culture Center that will juxtapose the screening of the film De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (2022) with VR experiences, and in particular Craig Quintero’s All That Remains (2022). The day will conclude with a public discussion among the authors of the works.

Filmmaker is continuous contamination, research, experimentation and avant-garde! It is cinema that never stops questioning itself, authors who are not afraid to question their work, a visual form always in motion.