Taking place from October 29th to November 3rd, the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival has unveiled the poster for the 2024 edition of the premiere Italian sci-fi festival, as well as the first wave of movie announcements.
The poster was designed by Michele Rech, aka Zerocalcare, one of the most beloved authors of the Italian and international comics scene. The poster illustrates the challenges and fears that generative artificial intelligence has brought up. As Zerocalcare explains, “The poster tells the story of the distance between how I imagined science fiction as a kid and how my expectations have evolved: we used to think that in the future machines would do the alienating and exhausting jobs, leaving humans free to dedicate themselves to the arts. Today, quite the opposite, the evolution of artificial intelligence shows us a possible dystopia in which machines replace us in drawing and writing, while people continue to wake up in the morning to go to their worksite”.
The first films announced that will be screened at this year’s festival are: Frédéric Jardin’s Survive, Brian Hanson’s The Bunker, starring Tony Todd, Clark Baker’s Test Screening, Joanne Mitchel’s Broken Bird, Mike Hermosa’s hilarious The Invisible Raptor, Michael Felker’s Things will be Different, Amanda Kramer’s documentary So Unreal, Calvin Lee Reeder’s The A-Frame, and Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. These films will form part of the alliance the festival has with the UK’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest. Alan Jones, co-director of FrightFest is also the artistic director of Trieste Science+Fiction Festival, and he said of the announcement: “Because I am also the co-director of FrightFest, I see a very wide selection of genre films on both the busy FrightFest and Trieste Science+Fiction submission platforms. So there is a certain crossover aspect that I wholeheartedly embrace because if a title works for the discerning FrightFest audience, I know it will also work for the Trieste Science+Fiction spectator too”.
Speaking of the AI element, Alan said: “From the past to the present and the future, AI is in all our lives. That’s the reason the Trieste Science+Fiction mission statement this year is ‘BrAInstorm the MegaFuture’, something the global community needs to do as a matter of urgency”.
The 24th edition of the Trieste Science+Fiction Festival promises a packed schedule of events and film previews. Held at the Politeama Rossetti and Teatro Miela, this year’s festival will showcase the finest global science fiction productions, encompassing a spectrum from horror to classic sci-fi. There will be no shortage of events dedicated to the connection between science and science fiction: Mondofuturo, the series of meetings to dialogue with popularisers and communicators of science about the world of tomorrow; IVIPRO Days, the annual event dedicated to video games as a resource for telling the story of cultural heritage; and the Fantastic Film Forum, a series of events dedicated to professionals in the film and audio-visual industry. Among this year’s novelties is the first edition of the Mondofuturo Literary Prize, an award for the best original science fiction book published in Italy in 2023, promoted by the national research organisation Area Science Park and the Film and Audiovisual Research and Experimentation Center ‘La Cappella Underground’.
For more information head over to https://www.sciencefictionfestival.org/en/
