Festival CinemaZERO (19)

“ZERO cinema” is an artisanal and experimental artistic approach that contrasts the assembly line of industrial film production; it is hyper-independent, produced or auto-produced by single artists or small groups (less than 10 people) with no commercial interests; it is made with common and easily accessible, or innovative and low cost, means of production.
“ZERO cinema” has a different attitude, adventurous or poetic, DIY or punk, anarchic or self-sufficient, to the video work; it speaks with a personal, intimate, courageous and autonomous voice.
“ZERO cinema” is, more than any other thing, a strong idea of cinema and artistic production.

If the Anthropocene has marked the human being’s devastating footprint on the planet, the irruption of Artificial Intelligences into the infosphere confronts us with a new evolutionary turning point. Moving past the phase of surprise and dystopian or apocalyptic rhetoric, it is time to ask: how can we use them for a more just, inclusive, and ecological world? At the same time, the world of cinema, and more generally of creative production, finds itself facing a technical revolution that, as has always happened in the history of cinema, raises enormous fears and reckless predictions, anathemas, and new experimental hybridizations.In continuity with the themes of the exhibition “ME&AI – Perspectives of co-evolution between human and artificial intelligence” (MUSE, December 19, 2026 – September 26, 2027), the FCZ MUSE ANTHROPOCENE award will be granted to a work in competition that attempts to venture into unexplored narrative and linguistic territories and to move beyond the narrative of fear, alienation, and technological and neo-Luddite paranoia.

We are looking for works that do not limit themselves to using the A.I. tool, but question it; not technocratic utopias or statements of blind optimism, but rather a critical, poetic, and original gaze. Solarpunk audiovisual works, projects capable of representing the co-evolution between human and artificial intelligence, hybrid aesthetics, new ecologies of the mind, dreams or nightmares seeking a deep and elaborate vision of the encounter between art and technology, and between human creativity and artificial production.

This section is opened to animation film ONLY.

Whether drawn by hand or in computer graphics, in step motion or made with mixed techniques, animation represents one of the richest expressions of "zero cinema". We are looking for works by authors, solitary or gathered in small groups, who express an artisanal approach, albeit technologically advanced.

Submissions in this section of no-animation works will be deleted automatically.