The Cactus International Children’s & Youth Film Festival in Aosta, Italy, has handed out its first ECFA Short Award. The prize went to the French short THE RIGHT WORDS (HAUT LES COEURS, Adrian Moyse Dullin).
The Cactus Film Festival has a strong belief in stories: “We all live through stories, we love telling them and listening to them. For more than a century the cinema has been one of the key places where stories have been told. The soft seats, the smell of popcorn, the chatter of the people around you that stops as soon as the lights go down, and then the story begins, coming to life on what just a moment before was nothing more than a blank canvas. The Cactus Film Festival was created in 2021 to combine our passion for stories and cinema.”
One of these stories tells about 15 year old Kenza and her 13 year old brother Mahdi, regularly acting out an escalation of petty cruelties and humiliations inspired by social networks. Today, during a bus ride, Kenza puts her naive and romantic little brother to the test: he must make a declaration of love right now to Jada; a girl Mahdi loves but who doesn’t know him. Pressured by his sister, Mahdi finally sets out about it.
THE RIGHT WORDS (produced by Punchline Cinéma) was picked by the ECFA Jury as Best Short. The jury were Nora Lakos (Hungary), Raffaella Persichella (Italy) and Felix Vanginderhuysen (Belgium).
