Juror
Cristina Piccino
[Juror’s Statement]
Being part of the jury at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival is a great joy for me because the first time I attended the festival as a critic and journalist was also my first trip to Japan, a country that for me is the absolute place of cinema, which I knew and loved through its great directors and authors of every genre and time, and which continues to be a source of discovery and revelation even today.
A jury is an opportunity to discover the images of authors and is also an important key to understanding what is happening in contemporary cinema, its trends and what escapes us, thus opening our eyes to new horizons.
I don’t like the separation that unfortunately still exists between “documentary” and “fiction.” Cinema is a matter of time, space, light, form, poetics and politics; and documentaries, because of the questions they pose to their images in constant comparison with the reality of the world, are often led to experiment in a more inventive way and with greater freedom.
This leads us to question certainties and produces a “listening” that is the substance of cinema, its wonder and its strength. It allows us to construct an image and an imaginary in which the feeling of the contemporary is alive, with its conflicts, with what we do not see in the chaos of images that surround us, with the stories that remain off-screen and the feeling of the world.
Critic and film journalist, she is editor-in-chief of the cinema section of the daily newspaper “il manifesto.” She is a programmer for Filmmaker Festival Milano, an international festival dedicated to documentary, experimental and research cinema, and teaches video art and documentary filmmaking at NABA—Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti’s international campus in Rome. She has curated several masterclasses on archiving with directors Jean-Gabriel Périot and Bani Khoshnoudi, among others. She has edited monographs dedicated to Peter Whitehead and Eyal Sivan, publishing essays in numerous collective volumes dedicated to Italian and international cinema. She is a member of the jury for the David di Donatello Italian Film Award. She lives in Rome.