“L’Agnello”, the first work by Mario Piredda produced by Ivan Olgiati and Chiara Galloni for Articolture and realized with the contribution of Regione Sardegna – Sardegna Film Commission (SFC) will be competing in Alice nella Città.
Mario Piredda who, in 2017, won the David di Donatello award for the short “At my home”, makes his feature debut with the delicate story of Anita, a sixteen-year-old girl who is fighting against her father’s illness and an entire region.

The film also marks the debut of the very young protagonist, Nora Stassi, “a shattering and well recognizable face, a look that tells us about a new Sardinia, and the important contradictions that encompass it”.
Nevina Satta explains how the support for talented young islanders is one of the main lines of intervention of the film commission she heads: “lately their potential has shined at a lot of festivals, from “Twin Flower” to “Daughter of mine” to the films of Bonifacio Angius: we are working to stabilize the training of under 18 actors and we want to pay particular at- tention to the products that represent them.”
Not just up-and-coming actors and directors, but also musicians and sound technicians: “the industry is recognizing that Sardinia does not just mean locations, but an artistic pool of creativity and style.”

Satta continues: “at the same time, in fact, we are building itineraries of project connections between musicians and sound designers around the world because a lot of our talents already operate in international cooperative creative groups. The international community acknowledges homemade Sardinian talent without any difficulty: take the case of Igort, the Italian Takeshi Kitano who is more popular abroad and surrounds himself with talents from all over the world who want to work with him on his new projects, contaminating noble arts and pop styles like in the extraordinary “5 is the perfect number”.

There is, therefore, a double objective: to become a launchpad for talents and original projects and to boost creative exchanges between investors, producers and originators of stories.

One of the ways to achieve this is certainly international series, especially following the arrival on the island, last year, of the set of “Catch 22”, George Clooney’s Paramount TV series, available on Hulu and Sky: “4 and a half months spent on the island that permitted highly concentrated filming even in very popular locations like the Costa Smeralda and made Sardinia very attractive to international productions. We demonstrated that Sardinia can also offer not just uncontaminated locations from a naturalistic viewpoint, but also special places for filming, like abandoned airports, mines, lighthouses and timeless stone villages”.
It is not a coincidence, Satta reveals, that negotiations are in progress with various OTT players: “exactly because the island guarantees that protected treatment, far from the chaos and the paparazzi, that film series require today, at the same time making it possible to personalize the places, transforming whole areas of the region into permanent sets, whilst respecting the eco-system.”
Attention to the environment is another hobby-horse of the film commission which has an increasingly strict ‘green’ policy that is now, specifies Satta, “practically inevitable for anyone filming with us.”

This permeation of place and set is already a reality in Carloforte, with “L’Isola di Pietro” the famous Lux Vide drama, the third season of which will be broadcast in October on Mediaset: “the set lives on the island for 5 months of the year, in the spring and the fall periods, alternating healthily with the tourist flow and actually significantly raising the local professional expertise.”

Another ‘made in Sardinia’ series will be coming to Sky also in October: “1994”, filmed in Gallura last year.

Another strand of the Sardegna Film Commission’s intervention, the most innovative part, is linked to animation and the transformation of the island into a permanent training and production laboratory also thanks to the partnership with the Canadian Toon Boom, currently the most widely used 2D software that led to the birth of the NAS (New Animation in Sardegna) project, now at the starting line: “in October courses will be launched to certify around fifty 2D animators: our intention is to make them 150 in 2020. We are not only directing our efforts towards islander animators but also any talents that want to make Sardinia their professional home: this is because the basic training will be flanked by an introduction into productions that involve a TV series and three feature movies that are European coproductions originating in Sardinia.
The first animators’ session will touch upon Cagliari and then expand to other towns on the island, like Alghero and Nuoro, thus creating a per- manent laboratory modeled on the experience of Angoulême and the Polê Image Magelis.”

An ambitious project, the first assessment of which will be possible at the next edition of Cartoon Digital, the European master organized by Brussels’ Cartoon Media which, following last year’s record attendance, will be returning to Cagliari from May 25 to 28.

The development of the Sardegna Film Network, the shared platform that unites the festivals with the relevant industry spaces and the training activities on the island into a single entity supervised by the SFC, also falls within the logic of a regional network.