Premi Short e SuperShort

Alberto Signetto
Born in 1954 in Cordoba, Argentina, he deals with cinema and communication since 1970. He is one of the founders of the Artkino cooperative (quality film distribution : Wenders, Laing, Wajda, Sanders, etc.) and in charge of cinema, theater and communication section at Comunardi bookshop. He works as a film director since 1982. In 1984 he founded, with others, the movie and television production company ROSEBUD. Since 1992 he collaborates with the INDEX cooperative and since 2003 with KINOETIKA Association and his RED RHINO PRODUCTIONS. He currently lives in Turin and Buenos Aires. Among his latest works: "THAÏS ovvero della Conversione in Opera" (2009/2010 - currently in production), "Cailloux" (2009), "Liberi dentro" and "Progetto Prisma" (2008).

Alessandro Ippolito
Born in Naples, he began as a literary journalist, he worked for the cultural department of RTSI, as an author, screenwriter, director and has taught animation at the RSI. As a young man, he also had experience as an actor and dubber. He is enrolled at SIAE as an author since 1983 and at the Order of Journalists as a free lance since 1975. He wrote, directed and produced the first Italian soap opera ("L’altalena") and worked with leading public and private Italian network as the author of many TV programs. Since a few years ago he has been directing an international television production company. He is also fond of the internet, he worked on the first draft of the Mediasetonline portal and he developed as a writer, director and producer the first two Italian web fiction ("Girls" and "La grande sorella").

Daniele Lucca
Author, actor, radio and TV anchorman, cultural worker, he has lived, studied and worked in Italy, USA, Spain and France. Since 1986 he has taken part as an author and / or leading actor and / or linkman: fourteen plays, twelve films including short movies and feature films, twelve documentaries, eighteen radio broadcasts, two television programmes, fifty-eight major events. he is one of the protagonists of the film debut of Roberto Sironi “Film di notte” presented in the “Cinephiles” section of Cannes Film Festival. He permanently oversees the artistic direction and organization of events for three major art cities.

Gerda Kochanska
Free lance photographer and photosearcher, she trained in Poland at the Academy of Photography and graduated at the University of Barcelona in Spanish Language and Literature. She has exhibited in Poland, Italy, Great Britain (Host Gallery "Summer Show" in London) and Spain (Trafic '08 and '09, Sevillafoto Festival 2008, Visionaris in Mallorca, Exposición DOMESTIC Espai Cultural Caja Madrid 2010 in Barcelona). Among her recent publications, the honor of the portfolio in Ojo de pez, one of the most prestigious journals in the world of photography. In 2008 she received the Award of Excellence Photographic Story, in 2009 she was appointed Latent Talent SCAN. That same year, Honourable Mention Award in Visual Culture and first prize in the Renaissance Photography Prize. In 2010 she was a finalist of Descubrimientos PhotoEspaña.

James Rumsey
As curator of “Feast On Film” (a short film and networking event in London) his love of short film is well fed well and in great health. A writer / director of short films, he began a love affair with Skepto at its inaugural festival in 2010 when his short film “Milk Man” won the Best Short Film award. Before committing to directing, his extensive experience as a 1st assistant director culminated in him working for the BBC and as a tutor on student productions coming out of the National Film & Television School in England. He is also an experienced script reader, a graduate in Film & Drama from the University of Reading, and Film Production from Vancouver Film School.  His production company Rum Jam Films is developing a feature script set in Sardinia called “The Last Con”.

Mario Piredda
Director, cameraman and editor. Born in Sassari (Sardinia), in 1999 he moves to Bologna, where he graduates in Cinema at DAMS. In 2005 he shoots his first short movie "Il Suono della Miniera". He is part of Elenfant Film, independent film studio, with which he directed, in 2010, the short movie "Io Sono Qui", in nomination at David di Donatello 2011, winner of many festivals and of "Insula(e)" special award at Skepto International Film Festival 2011. He worked and contributed to the production of many short movies, documentaries and videoclips. He is currently releasing his new work "Los aviones que se caen".

Rafael Arocha
Born in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, in 1978. Self-taught photographer, he lives and works in Barcelona. His work involves a personal reflection on the experiences and their memories. His works have been part of group and solo exhibitions in various festivals and meetings in Spain and in Palermo, Casablanca, the Azores. In the last few years, he combined the photographer work with the coordination of projects oriented to the creation and circulation of documentary photography. He was commissioner and coordinator of the Festival of Photography TRAFIC (Barcelona, 2008-2009). He collaborated on the organization of Barcelona Magnum Workshops 2009. In 2010 he organized the screening of the Ojo de Pez Photomeeting portfolio and founded Phacto - area of photo action in Barcelona. In recent years he has been awarded with the Fotointerpreta scholarship of the Centro de Fotografia Documental of Barcelona (2009), and he has received a special mention of ViewbookPhotostory and the 3rd prize in the Prix de Photographie in Paris.

Environmental Sustainability Special Award

Associazione Sustainable Happiness

Sustainable Happiness is a happy window on sustainability or a sustainable window on happiness…

SUSTAINABLE HAPPINESS is a cultural association whose members share values connected to the pursuit of happiness and to the social, economic and environmental sustainability. It is committed to the promotion and diffusion of culture, naturalism, heritage, and every form of knowledge and language, and to the creation of social relationships' networks as the base of the development of free and conscious citizens. Since 2010, the association organizes in Cagliari the ALIG'ART Festival that, through an innovative approach, puts forward an alternative view, necessary and urgent, of the idea of development, for which strive to face the present and future challenges: an afterthought on our lifestyle, with the promotion of an individual and global change that starts from bringing our current development model into question. For more infos: www.sustainablehappiness.it

Special Mention for the Best Animated Short Movie

Maria Paz Montecinos
She is an art Director with extensive experience in documentaries, editing, special effects and multimedia. She is currently Artistic Director of the Cad Productions of Barcelona, with whom she made several documetaries and awareness campaigns in Africa and Latin America for UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), Shell Foundation, IDB (Inter-American Development Bank), ACCD (Agència Catalana de Cooperació al Desenvolupament) and produces audiovisual projects with the Barcelona International Peace Resource Center.

Moritz Mayerhofer
He was born in 1981and he studied Animation at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg and Gobelins, Paris. After his graduation with the Oscar-shortlisted "Urs", he just finished his work on two new shortfilms "father" and "AMEN!". He works as a freelance director, designer and animator. Besides developing new projects, Moritz is currently preparing his debut-feature based on the critically acclaimed childrens book 'At the Ark at eight o'clock' produced by Now Films and Filmautoren AG.

Avant-garde and Experimental Special Award

Alessandro Bavari

He was born in Latina (Italy), on April 1963. He grew up in an Italian-French family and he has been attracted to art since he was very young, so he decided to study it in all its aspects: he began to deal with photography since he was only 15. Moreover, he studied scenography, photography, history of art at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, in Rome. So he developed a deep knowledge of several artistic techniques, from oil painting to watercolour, from chalcography to photography. Over the years, he portrayed human and animal subjects, landscapes and architectures, that are added to his imaginative world, heavily influenced by Indo-European culture and by 14th and 15th-century artists, too. Since 1993 he makes use of digital processing techniques, thereby developing a personal artistic language, "some sort of contamination between different arts, dissolving the frontiers that set them apart".

VideoClip Special Award

Emanuele Contis
He starts studying saxophone when he was six; since 1991 he has been a stable member of the band "Lao Silesu" from Samassi, with which he takes part in several international festivals. In 1997 he started the activity of session musician and collaborated with several artists such as Fiordaliso, Annalisa Minetti, Gatto Panceri , Paola Canestrelli, Neja, Herbie Goins, Wendy Lewis, Orlando Johnson, and many others. Since 2003 he has studiedJazz at the Conservatoire "G.P. da Palestrina" of Cagliari and he contributes to the activities promoted by his course's teachers and colleagues. Since 2004 he has been co-leader, together with pianist Andrea Granitzio, of the jazz band "Aghera", with which he records the homonymous album for the label Tajrà (Cagliari, 2007). He took part in European Jazz Expò 2006 (with "La Contrabbanda") and 2007 (with "Aghera"), in the Festival "“Jazzando…Musica intorno al Mondo” of Rome (with "Aghera"), in the Festival Time In Jazz 2008 of Berchidda (with "Aghera"), in the Festival Musica Sulle Bocche 2009 as sidemen of the band Ajo-jo Mandi & The Youngers of Enzo Favata and U.T. Gandhi, in Salon de Musique 2009 (with the "IMPROSA TONGUE" project of guitarist Simone Schirru), in Ray’s Jazz Cafè of Londra (with "Aghera trio"). In 2010 he presented at Nuoro Jazz Festival, a project entirely composed, arranged and orchestrated by him and Granitzio, which involves Aghera band, trumpet player Paolo Fresu and simphony band "Lao Silesu".

Massimo Palmas
Born in Cagliari in 1954. Founder and Artistic Director of the International Jazz Festival in Sardinia since 1980; Artistic Director of European Jazz Expo since 2002; founder and president of Sardegna Concerti, leading company in Sardinia in the pop music field (Amphiteatre Festival - Big Events in Cagliari, Festivalguer in Alghero). Since more than thirty years he has been one of the major entarteinment promoter in Sardinian panorama, which brought  in Sardinia big national and international artists such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, James Brown, Joe Cocker, Sting, Deep Purple, Micheal Bublè, Manu Chao, De Gregori, Battiato, Vasco Rossi, Ligabue, Zucchero, Laura Pausini, Jovanotti, Elisa and many others.

Sergio Benoni
Journalist expert in music and new media, Net pioneer, he founded in 1995 the first European webradio, Radio X. As an editorial consultant he created and directed Internet portals and thematic channels for important international operators. In partnership with Peter Gabriel,  he signed in 2001 the first agreement with discographic majors for the online distribution of their catalogue on the Tiscali portals. He coordinated special events, he designed great artists' websites such as U2, Bob Dylan and Sting. In the last years he dealed with IPTV and editorial formats development for multimedia platforms. As a journalist he interviewed personalities such as Michail Gorbaciov, Nicholas Negroponte, Steve Jobs, Miles Davis, Fabrizio De Andrè, Madonna and Paul McCartney. He is co-author with Tito Stagno of the book “Mister Moonlight – Confessioni di un telecronista lunatico” (ed. minimum fax 2009).  He teaches “Mass Media Theory and Method” at Istituto Europeo di Design in Cagliari.

Simone Schirru
Musician, composer and teacher. He lives in Bruxelles and he graduated in the Jazz section of the Conservatoire of Cagliari. He plays in the fields of Jazz, improvisation and sound research in many festival and events in Europe,  U.S.A. and India, together with artists of world renown. He has several record publications to his credit. He is also fond of video and in the last years he is particularly interested in the interactions between music and different forms of communication. With the Pixeldrama project he is working on the extemporary creation of soundtracks, with Federico Eterno and Giulia Landi he works on the interaction between improvisation and animation, moreover he has collaborated with dancers, poets and photographers.

Valentina Casalena
Born in 1975 in S. Benedetto del Tronto (AP), she graduated in Electronic Engineering, sche worked for Ericsson Telecommunications and she maturated experience in the telecommunications and Information Technology fields. Partner of Sardinian artist Andrea Parodi, one of the most beautiful voices of Sardinia, she maturated experience in the organization of musical and cultural events, and in record production. She founded and is at the head of the ANDREA PARODI FOUNDATION for which she carries out several cultural activities (concerts, meetings), such as the PREMIO ANDREA PARODI, well-known World Music festival and contest, that has reached its 5th edition.

Schools award (Italy)

Teresa Porcella
After the degree in philosophy, she specialized in multimedia publishing in Pistoia and she got the master in Multimedia at the Università di Firenze, where she specialized in multimedia design. She worked for several years in the electronic publishing field in Florence and Milan, then she came back to paper publishing, where she currently works as an editor for Motta Junior brand. She teached childrens' fiction at university for several years and she works in the publishing field also as designer and author.  She studied dancing, violin, singing and acting; she loves to read out for adults and kids.  She is the President of the Associazione Scioglilibro that, among other things, organizes reading and writing labs, music, art and theatre labs, reading promotion, theatrical shows, meetings and conferences, and deals with teachers', librarians' and cultural operators' training. For five years Teresa has been  in charge of kids' section at the literary Festival of Gavoi, in Sardinia. In March 2012 she opened in Florence the bookshop "Cuccumeo", oriented to kids but not prohibited for adults.

Marco Schirru
Professor of humanistic information science, now retired. He has always dealt with the significantly formative aspects of formal languages, with particular attention to multimedia and hypertext as elaboration and communication language codes. In this scenario, where the theoretical and formal aspects of linguistic communication have always implied the presence of several codes originated by contextual and generative grammars, he gave promincence to the reflection on the languages and on their ways of being and existing not only as a mean to express identity and individuality, but especially as the ability to improve the investigation and research on the world around us. His past and current course of studies has developed combining the paradigms of aesthetics and ethics with the logical necessity to know, not only introspectively. Since 2010 he has been president of Skepto cultural association.