The film by director Ady Walter has won the “Progressive Cinema” competition. The Ferrovie dello Stato Group, as official sponsor of the Rome Film Fest, is offering up 20 Trenitalia Gift Cards worth 50 euro each as prizes for the cinema-going public.
“SHTTL” by Argentinean Director Ady Walter is the winner of the “FS Audience Award”, presented this afternoon at the Rome Film Fest. The film received the most votes from viewers out of the 16 films competing in the “Progressive Cinema – Visions for Tomorrow’s World” competition.
The FS Group, with CEO Luigi Ferraris at the helm, was again this year the official sponsor of the Rome Film Fest, offering 20 Trenitalia Gift Cards valued at 50 euro each to the cinema audience. Presenting the award to the film “SHTTL”, as part of the official award ceremony at the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, were actor and director Valerio Mastandrea along with Luca Torchia, Chief Communications Officer of the FS Group.
“We are very happy to have contributed to giving a voice to the audience that chose SHTTL, directed by Ady Walter, as the winner of the FS Group Audience Award,” affirmed Luca Torchia, the FS Group’s Chief Communications Officer. “The FS Group not only accompanies Italians every day as they discover cities and villages whilst connecting territories but also brings people closer to the world of art and culture, in all its forms and manifestations. Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane’s support for the Rome Film Fest is yet a further demonstration of this mission and of the commitment of the entire Group to ensuring, along with the mobility of people and freight, that of their ideas, culture and the civil and social values of the country.”
“SHTTL” (from “shtetl” in Yiddish, being the typical Jewish village found all over Eastern Europe up until World War II) was chosen from a selection of films made in 18 different countries and with different characteristics – covering the genres of thrillers and crime, road movies, dystopias, comedies, dramas, history and biographies, in black and white and in colour. “SHTTL” (109’), was filmed in France and Ukraine, being set in 1941. Argentinean director Ady Walter uses the sequence shots and black and white (with the spatio-temporal continuity being broken by flashbacks in colour) as tools to lead the spectator into the reality of a Jewish world, between philological reconstruction and allusion to the present. Speaking Yiddish is an international cast, including Saul Rubinek (“Unforgiven”), who is acting in this language for the first time. The village was entirely reconstructed 60 kilometres from Kiev.