Lago Film Fest is a festival of independent cinema and expanded creativity which, over the last sixteen years, has brought to the small town of Lago (Italy) a community of artists, filmmakers and performers to meet an audience of passionate spectators, lunatics and lovers.

Born as a project of relational arts, based on principles of inclusion, dialogue with the surrounding landscape and constant interaction between different artforms, Lago Film Fest has grown to become a cultural landmark. We are now bringing to the FeKK Festival two short film programmes from our archives.

Our selection of Italian works explores the idea of primitive identity through the contamination of different styles – which is typical of LFF’s practice. At the same time, this is our attempt to sum up what has been our curatorial process over the past ten years; from unknown cult films that had an undeniable impact on filmmaking by turning the lack of technical means into a deliberate aesthetic code, through to works experimenting with cinematic language, to wild animations, and documentaries telling universal stories.

The primitive identity is that of the authors, of the stories they tell, of the process of research and selection that we replicate every year, delving into Italian films – in other words, it is our own primitive identity.

Our international selection leans towards the Weird and the Eerie, unfathomable aesthetic categories which are dear to Lago Film Fest as much as they were to Mark Fisher, the philosopher who theorised them: the violent whimsicality of the body and the uneasiness that arises when what should be there isn’t (or vice versa). The first fills the homoerotic phantasmagoria of Knockstrike, the endless TV commercial in Great Choice, the esoteric rites of an anthropomorphic hare in Misplaced Memories (the astonishing debut animation of Ivana Radić), up to the masochistic piñata of the Mexican Dulce Dolor. The second fills up the non-places of The Rabbit Hunt and its DIY hunt in Florida’s Everglades; and the swimming pool overflowing with Satanism (although not physically there, the Devil is in the details) in the Spanish The Golden Legend, winner of our last edition.

Federica Pugliese, Carlo Migotto

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