Share Crossing is a special section of the Piemonte Share Festival dedicated to web cinema and the production of works that seek to combine and blend the contents of movie genres with digital communication platforms.

The multiplication of terms and designations has always been a forerunner to great change. Whether it is Random Cinema, Machinima, Interactive Cinema, Generative Cinema, Flash Cinema, Micro Cinema or Live Cinema, motion pictures today are increasingly reaching into and shaping our daily lives.

In this first year of work, we have focused on how web cinema frees the artist from the traditional production context of films, paving the way for a sort of second “nouvelle vague”, as distributed digital technology further revolutionises approaches to producing motion pictures. While the first nouvelle vague took movie cameras outside the studio, off fixed tripods and into the flexible hands of directors, web cinema represents the next step beyond that revolution, towards individual, personal and non-linear cinema.

A sud di Pavese www.asuddipavese.it

The centennial celebrations of the birth of the great Piedmontese writer Cesare Pavese were seized as an opportunity and fertile ground for the creation and production of a web cinema piece which, using new communication technologies, proved to be a flexible and pertinent tool for drawing a vast young audience closer to the works and life of the celebrated writer.

The result was entitled A Sud di Pavese, an interactive, non-linear web documentary where the spectator becomes the author of an investigation into the memory of Pavese in our contemporary world.
Taking three quintessential settings from the works of Cesare Pavese as its starting points – the Langhe, Turin and the Calabrian seaside – this web documentary weaves its way between the writings of Pavese and images, creating new, unexpected associations between the places and the stories narrated. Footage shot by Matteo Bellizzi thus became, with the collaboration of Antonio Rollo, the source material for an “open” documentary which quite literally raises the curtain on the movement that lies behind the film: a journey that takes literature as its starting point to arrive elsewhere, encountering along the way the stories told by Pavese.

A Sud di Pavese is a project of great innovative value. Through the internet, the material acquires even greater potential via a website, which enables narrative threads to multiply and weave into each other, guided by the curiosity and choices of the spectator, who can also leave comments and impressions. In this way, a new approach to interaction between narration and content is developed, in which entirely new concepts of usability and interactivity are created through the mental pathways of the spectator.

CONCEPTION and DESIGN:
The Sharing
Stefilm

PRODUCTION:
The Sharing (multimedia projects)
Stefilm (linear documentary)

ENTITIES INVOLVED:
Regione Piemonte Cultural Office
City of Turin
Municipality of Santo Stefano Belbo
Municipality of Brancaleone Calabro
Cinema Museum of Turin
Cesare Pavese Foundation
Casa Editrice Einaudi
Film Commission Torino Piemonte
Calabria Film Commission
TOPIX Consortium
Spime
ZDT- Arte (Germany)
YLE (Finland)
TSI (Swiss Italian television)
European Union MEDIA Programme