In this new configuration, only the Pardi di domani short film section remained unchanged, albeit additionally available online. The two main competitive strands, the International Competition and Filmmakers of the Present, were replaced by a line-up of twenty high-profile feature projects, international and Swiss, still to be completed. Despite all the changes and limitations, the Open Doors program turned out to be unexpectedly intimate, intense and vivid.
Far from the madding crowd, free from hectic work meetings and interviews, cut off from all the diversions of the festival and secluded in the comparatively quiet surroundings of home, virtual audiences were able to give their undivided attention to the films offered online.
Available on the web exclusively during the festival, the Open Doors Screenings seduced global viewers through an exciting selection of 10 feature and 10 short films from the Philippines, Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia. Skilfully curated by Open Doors team members Paolo Bertolin and Delphine Jeanneret and considerably enriched through a series of truly insightful conversations between the directors and the programmers, the Open Doors Screenings section took us on a journey of discovery.
While the focus was to some extent on aesthetics and crucial production issues, ultimately, political themes took centre stage. It offers advice, professional training, international co-production, funding and distribution collaborations to the participants, as well as grants to a few winning projects. Consequently, Open Doors opens cinema up to the diversity in the world, offering a forum and creating the conditions for new, unheard voices from afar from a European perspective to find their place on the world map of cinema, to express their sensibility, sorrow or anger, to rise up against the harsh realities of social marginalisation, prejudice, intolerance or censorship, often surprising us with original and daring cinematic approaches.
Faced with the baffling task of choosing from among the various seductive possibilities offered by the festival route planner, I was first drawn to a relatively well-known cinematic destination, the Philippines. The idea of a confined space, that runs like a guiding thread through these films, is a pivotal metaphor for a malaise that is not only existential, but essentially political.
