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La Guarimba: Young Ukrainian filmmakers to participate in Italian film residency Back

La Guarimba: Young Ukrainian filmmakers to participate in Italian film residency

10 May 2022

Situated in the southern Italian region of Calabria, La Guarimba is an innovation project and non-profit cultural association that endeavours to use culture to promote values of participatory democracy, integration, human rights and accessibility. La Guarimba’s main activities cover cinema, which they see as a fundamentally social act; ‘Our main goal is to bring the cinema back to the people and the people back to the cinema,’ La Guarimba announces on its website. Poignantly, ‘guarimba’ means ‘safe place’ in the indigenous language of Venezuela.

In the scope of European Cultural Foundation’s Culture of Solidarity Fund, La Guarimba offers scholarships to ten young and emerging Ukrainian filmmakers to participate in Kino Guarimba Film Residency’s 5th edition. In this 12-day training programme, filmmakers meet audiovisual professionals from different continents and work with them, cultivating new relationships. The residency is a safe space for expression and spreading stories and messages through film.

The residency provides the space, tools, guidance, community and network for a group of international creatives to get together to write, shoot, edit and screen short films. Each filmmaker is free to develop work they have total ownership over, while La Guarimba supports the distribution.

We talked to Ernesto Garrido from La Guarimba’s media office regarding the association’s ethos and activities.

What do you believe to be the social and political roles of cinema?

La Guarimba operates in a culturally abandoned area without cinemas, spaces dedicated to the arts and cultural initiatives. Covid-19 has amplified the existing problems, leading to a situation of isolation and the absence of social aggregation.

We reach out to our community to offer the opportunity to gather, interact, work together and enjoy an innovative, accessible and quality cultural program. For us, cinema is a community social act in opposition to an increasingly individualistic world, as a meeting point where the members of a community can share ideas and live a collective and personal experience in an area where there are no places that organise public screenings. The collective ritual of watching a film together can increase the cultural capital and the social wellbeing of our territory, together with the sensibility towards climate change, women empowerment and the integration of young people and refugees in the community.

Tell us about the residency– What is the nature of the works developed in its scope? What interactions do you foster between the resident filmmakers and other creatives? What is the long-term vision of this project?

Kino Guarimba is an extraordinary social experience and an innovative film training program that allows the artists participating in the project to explore their potential and unleash their creativity, overcome the constraints and pressures of traditional productions and live a community experience in a new context such as Southern Italy.

The project aims to create a new awareness of the multicultural complexity that populates our region, fostering an encounter between different cultures, with the mission of supporting a mutual understanding between international participants and the local community. For this reason, every year we work to build a heterogeneous community of artists, able to tell the town of Amantea through their point of view and their perspective, constituting a mosaic of visions composed of short films that have captured many aspects of Calabria. The films made during the 12 days of the residency are the result of the process of exchange and meeting between the participating artists and the local community.

The project aspires to involve more and more different cultures to train filmmakers with different experiences and backgrounds, also involving other places in Calabria to discover our history.

We would be glad to be introduced to past and/or present residents and their works.

Olga Chernykh and Marina Brodovska are two Ukrainian filmmakers who attended Kino Guarimba in 2019. Before coming to Amantea, they mainly worked in Kyiv and Ukraine in local short film productions and advertisements. Kino Guarimba was an opportunity for both of them to challenge themselves in an international environment, working with new people and creating new networking opportunities. After leaving Amantea, they stayed in touch and collaborated with other participants of that edition.

During the residency, they co-wrote and co-directed the short film ‘Bubble Theory’, working with a crew composed of people from Romania, Cyprus, Italy, Croatia and the US, filmed in different locations of Amantea and showing the natural landscape of the town.

After the Russian invasion, they’ll be back to Amantea to attend the 6th edition of the residency. They will be two of the 10 Ukrainian filmmakers we support with a scholarship.

Granted: €15,000

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