Poetry is the art of letting the sea enter a glass

Calvino’s precise words trace a fundamental path in considering the value of brevity as a key element within the context of important literary production. The concept’s core meaning can easily be extended to other expressive forms that make synthesis their own distinctive feature. Short films operate by means of temporal contractions that aim to condense life in a complete and illuminating form, just like poetry. They are powerful, liberating and essential in their attempts to offer harmony in a maze of emotions and sensations that define our being in the world. This is because if it were ever possible to suggest one characteristic of these authors, it would be precisely the ability to mould a form which starts as something indefinite and then becomes concrete or complete. Be it text or image, every work takes on features of a metamorphosis that puts into relief a previously unknown meaning. It is impossible to ignore the fact that every artistic act is indeed an act of discovery for both artist and viewer. This discovery is like a journey into the night, the end of which we are invested in the revealing force of the new light. The Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska wrote one of the most beautiful poems on poetry that I can remember. Its final verse is as follows: Poetry / what is poetry? / Many shaky answers / have already been given to this question. / But I don’t know, I don’t know and I cling to this / like to a sustaining railing. This is a sort of humanistic confession, one that escapes any hard and fast definitions but lends itself to something pure, risky and inevitably, the rescuing nature of creative work. It goes, therefore, that film work – short films – in a similar way to poetry, become an area in which it is possible to reflect freely on love, motherhood, sexuality, loss and absence. These are themes that are to be explored through a lens that considers length as an extension of our inner time rather than a limit to it, specifically because a hidden universe exists within which entire beings inhabit the details. The 39th edition of the Sulmona International Film Festival relies on the power that emotions can have in the usual manner of international short film production. Sixty pieces of work that explain an ‘elsewhere’ that is close to us all; unknown yet familiar, precisely because it draws upon a universality of feelings that we all share. Therefore, let us get lost in this glass and swim with the intention of discovering ourselves once again.