Before the eighth edition, there was the seventh — a year that, looking back, showed the festival exactly what it could be when the selection was this strong. The 7th Edition's awards spanned four countries and four very different sensibilities, and several of the filmmakers recognised that year have gone on to notable work. Here is how the seventh edition's trophies were awarded.
Best Fiction — The Cartographer
The Best Fiction award went to The Cartographer, a Lebanese short that impressed the jury with its formal control and the weight it carried in a short running time. It was a film about mapping and loss — about the impossibility of ever fully charting a place you have had to leave — and it announced its director as a filmmaker of real seriousness. The Fiction category that year was among the most competitive in the festival's history to that point.
Best Documentary
The documentary award recognised a work of patient observation, rooted — as our documentary winners so often are — in a specific community and made with evident trust between filmmaker and subject. The jury noted that the film never rushed and never extracted; it simply watched, closely and generously, until something true emerged.
The seventh edition showed the festival what it could be when the selection was this strong.
Best Animation
The animation trophy went to a technically accomplished and emotionally direct piece that reminded the room how much feeling can be carried by handmade images. In a field that is always small at our festival but rarely weak, it stood clearly above the rest.
Best Experimental
The experimental award, that year including a striking piece with roots in Romania, went to work that used the medium's own materials — image, sound, time — as its true subject. It was, the jury felt, experimental in the honest sense: strange because the film required it, not because strangeness was the goal.
The through-line
What connected the seventh edition's winners was not style — they could hardly have been more different — but necessity. Each was a film that had to be made in the form it took. That is the quality our juries return to, edition after edition, and it is the quality the seventh edition had in abundance. The countries in the running that year, from Lebanon to Romania and well beyond, were once again the direct result of a festival that costs nothing to enter and therefore hears from filmmakers who would otherwise have stayed silent.
The seventh edition set a high bar, and the eighth, we think, cleared it. The 9th Edition is now open for submissions on FilmFreeway. If your film has to exist in the form it takes, we would like to see it.
Inte Cinema Festival is an independent short film festival and cultural association based in Rome. Submissions for the 9th Edition are open now on FilmFreeway.