"We wanted to keep things focused," says Luca Raffaelli, the festival's artistic director and full-time emcee. "Keeping everything in one screening place is the best thing for a small festival. It creates a friendly situation, with the audience interacting with the staff and the guests."

The Atmosphere
The festival was initially the dream of organizational director Piero Fortini and has expanded faster than anyone envisioned. The first year, the only international guest was Jimmy Murakami; this year, those attending and presenting films included Marv Newland (Canada), Oscar Grillo (Argentina), Joanna Quinn (UK), Candy Kugel (US), Ferenc Cako (Hungary) and Rin Taro (Japan).

The small size has other benefits: there is a spontaneity that would be impossible at a more frantic festival. At one point, during a live performance by pianist Roberto Frattini (who frequently does music for Bruno Bozzetto), Oscar Grillo, Marv Newland and Miguel Rep engaged in a sort of impromptu drawing bee at the front of the auditorium. The relaxed atmosphere was also enhanced by the large number of children in the audience; while not all the films were for kids, the younger set was generally a major presence. (The attitude seemed a lot more accepting than in the US, where kids sometimes are regarded as more of a public nuisance than an organic part of life.)

Grillo and Luca Raffaelli. Courtesy of I Castelli Animati.

This has led to some growing pains. "We don't want to get too big, but we received more good submissions this year than we had room for. We couldn't say no, so we added a fourth day and began screenings earlier both in the morning and in the evening to accommodate them. The perfect festival would have meant cutting 2 1/2 hours each day." Despite the growth, the programs ran exceedingly smoothly, thanks to Fortini's staff and the remarkable, multi-tasking organizer Irene Duranti, who frequently seemed to be in three locales at once.

Our Viewing Pleasure
While the overall effect of this demographic was wonderful, it could create some problems. Marv Newland's latest film, Fuv -- a daring and intriguing work that employs comic timing as far from the current norm as his Sing Beast Sing seemed twenty years ago -- seemed simply to baffle most of the kids at its afternoon screening.

The award winners were well chosen. Konstantin Bronzit's Au bout du monde (France/Russia, 1999) won both the international jury's Grand Prize and the Audience Prize. This irresistible piece about a house precariously balanced on a peak is, in the best sense, a textbook model of how to take a simple gag concept and then amplify and compound it to the limit.

A Special Jury Prize was awarded to Bruno Bozzetto's Europe & Italy (Italy, 1999), which uses simpler-even-than-South Park computer animation for a series of hilarious comparisons between Italy and the rest of the EEC.