The Imagination of a Child - Directed by Cesare Catania

Project Type: Short Film

Project Title: The Imagination of a Child

Brief Synopsis: The movie, mostly in black and white, completely devoid of dialogue and interspersed with moments of reflection for the viewer in front of the written thoughts of the “narrator”, analyzes the psychological evolution of an artist who develops ideas and beliefs related to the world of art. The story of the film, conceived by the artist and director as a “democratic work of art”, takes place in the present day, in particular in the cities of Milan and Venice (the latter in particular a key city of the film). It tells the story of two lives, that of an Italian sculptor and that of a little girl, originally from Sri Lanka, who lives with her family in Italy. Both lives of the two protagonists are somehow linked by an unbridled artistic passion, and the entire film revolves around the design of a sculpture (the one actually created by the Italian artist and entitled “The Embrace” F Version, a physical sculpture exhibited at the same time as the production of the film at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale). This design is the main element of the story told, the one that allows the lives of the two protagonists, despite starting from such distant points, to intertwine in the end in a “disruptive encounter between two opposites”. At the end of the short, in fact, it turns out that in reality the entire film was nothing more than the artist’s dream and that the two protagonists were none other than the same person. The Italian artist therefore identifies himself with the black girl. The Caucasian artist and the black girl are the same person in the film. This choice is singular, mainly linked for the director to overcoming all cultural barriers, in an artistic context of 2024 under the theme “Stranieri ovunque”, the title of the Venice Art Biennale where the sculpture “The Embrace”, protagonist of the short film, is exhibited throughout 2024 as the official work of art of the national pavilion. Furthermore, the main objective of the film is to describe the psychology of an artist through a dream, a dream in which the same person realizes that he must look at the world from two different points of view: as an adult with the eyes of maturity and as a child with the eyes of fantasy. The true artist, according to the film, is the one who looks at the world around him with the eyes of an adult and with the fantasy of a child; in practice… “a worker of emotions”.

Cultural Background: The short is part of an artistic journey that sees the director of the film as the first creator of works of art with a social background entitled "The Embrace". then founder of the movement called "Embrace Project", an artistic project with a socio-cultural matrix that tends to do good in an ethical way through art. Through the Embrace Project, art is no longer the end aimed at by the artist but the means through which to spread a message of peace and equality. For the "Embrace Project", the artist Cesare Catania, director and creator of the film "The Imagination of a Child", is nominated Unique Ambassador in the World for National Hugging Day in 2023. This path leads the artist to write the first Manifesto of Democratic Art of History at the beginning of 2024 and to create, again in 2024, the artistic short film with a documentary background entitled "The Imagination of a Child", a short that enhances the relationship between the artist and his art through the eyes of a child, a short documentary that revolves around the sculpture entitled "The Embrace" created in 2023 and exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale in 2024 as a work of art official of a national pavilion