Ermanno Olmi Award for short films by young directors

an opportunity to remember the master, and for young directors it represents the opportunity to show off and receive financial support to cultivate their passion. The cinema. Back to Bergamo on Ermanno Olmi Award, created to promote and enhance the short films of Italian and foreign talents. The Award, aimed at authors who have not passed 30 years of age, it includes 3 cash prizes (1,200 euros, 500 euros, 300 euros), made available by the Bergamo Film Meeting Onlus Association, and a special mention to the most significant work relating to a topic indicated by the municipal administration.

For this year the Department of Culture has chosen as the theme The religion of little things: Ermanno Olmi’s cinema reflects the search for a less transcendent and more immanent spirituality, which is realized in the relationships between people and in the relationship with nature. The poetry of his films finds expression in the sincerity of the faces and the authenticity of the gestures, in the representation of a genuineness in peasant life, in work, in daily actions. Ermanno Olmi’s message reaches everyone because his religious dimension disregards dogmas, putting first the will to seek the good and to rediscover joy in simple, little everyday things.

The deadline for submitting films, in which works by the maximum duration of 15 minutes, fictional, documentary or animated films produced in 2021 and 2022 set for October 16, 2022

(Info and registration: www.premioolmi.it). The announcement of the winners scheduled for Tuesday December 6, 2022 in the Auditorium of Piazza della Libert in Bergamo. If there are limitations for Covid, the award ceremony and the screening of the finalist films will be broadcast online, on a dedicated streaming platform.

The Ermanno Olmi Award reaches its 4th edition and continues to be strongly desired by this municipal administration, not only to remember the greatness of the director from Bergamo, but also to help support the work of young people directors and directors – comments the Councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Bergamo, Nadia Ghisalberti -. It is precisely the creativity and ideas of the youngest who are the fulcrum of the cultural growth of a society, their fundamental gaze in the reading of contemporaneity. An authentic gaze, which in the criticality of the time we live in helps to recover and propose new profound meanings; for this reason the special mention of this edition reflects on the theme of the “religion of little things”, a motif that permeates the works of Ermanno Olmi and his testimonies of a spiritual research that has little to do with dogmas, while it is carried out in the human relationships, in the relationship with nature and in the ability to grasp the poetry of everyday life.

The Ermanno Olmi Award promoted by the Municipality of Bergamo, with the organizational support of Lab 80 film cooperative society and the collaboration of Bergamo Film Meeting Onlus. In line with the Minimum Environmental Criteria, sustainability parameters for cultural events welcomed by the Municipality of Bergamo, the Award inserted in the European project Green Fest: a civil commitment to combine environment and culture, and a dutiful homage to Ermanno Olmi, whose cinematography has always been attentive to environmental issues.