Editor

Trieste Science+Fiction Festival, taking place from October 31st to November 5th 2017, presents the poster of the 17th edition created by LRNZ, aka Lorenzo Ceccotti, one of the leading comics artists of the Italian school.

Lorenzo Ceccotti was a guest of last year’s Trieste Science+Fiction Festival during the Italian premiére of Monolith, Ivan Silvestrini’s filmbased on the graphic novel written by Roberto Recchioni and Mauro Uzzeo published by Sergio Bonelli and graphic art by LRNZ.

“Walking around Trieste - Lorenzo Ceccotti tells us – I fell in love with the buiding sites in the old harbour. One in particular caught my eye, set in a wonderful location right behind the festival location. It is not unusual to see gigantic machinery doing titanic work around harbour building sites, but in Trieste, thanks to the exceptional length of an amazing, incredibly abstract seafront and the timeless beauty of the old cranes, I could not help but imagining a building site of the near future. The “Ursus” crane, one of the most beautiful industrial objects in the world, will probably become obsolete in a hopefully very distant future and be replaced by a brand new technical wonder, another mechanical gentle giant. I tried to imagine the old harbour in the future. The members of the family from Trieste I drew at the bottom right of the poster are by contrast very small: Linda, Annalisa and Andrea – whom I know in real life – a mum and dad taking their young daughter to see what the human imagination is capable of doing. Hooray for Ursus! The future has always been somebody’s dream or nightmare, that is why I love the idea that an hallucination may be very close to reality: it allows imagination to spill out into our everyday world. Odaiba Gundam’s statue, for example, is one of these extreme attempts.”

Artist Lorenzo Ceccotti, aka LRNZ  lives and works in Rome in a number of visual art fields: graphic design, motion graphics, animation, illustration and sequential narrative. A founder of the SUPERAMICI collective and of the BRUTUS/CHIMP CO. design studio, he shas been working on solo projects since 2006, and has taught at the IED (European Institute of Design) and currently teaches at the Scuola Romana dei Fumetti and the ISIA in  Rome. A few examples of his most important work in graphic art: the animation of The Dark Side Of The Sun as a director, his first comic book Golem (published in three countries), Astrogamma – written by Alessandro Caroni, first published as a series by Hobby Comics, leader publication of the SUPERAMICI collective, illustrations and covers of Haruki Murakami’s La Strana Biblioteca(published by Einaudi), countless covers and illustrations of magazines, books and comic books. He recently completed MONOLITH, a project for Sergio Bonelli Publishers including a live action film and two full color comic books written by Roberto Recchioni e Mauro Uzzeo, and his latest artbook Viewpoint, published by Magnetic Press/Lion Forge.

The official selection of Trieste Science+Fiction Festival this year is presenting three international contests: the Asteroid Award, an international competition for the best science fiction film by emerging directors from all over the world, and the two Silver Méliès Awards of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation for the best European feature film and best European short film of science fiction. The section Spazio Italia will host the very best of our national production. Finally, don't miss the Conferences on Futurology dedicated to science and literature, in collaboration with the main scientific institutions, and the assignment of the Lifetime Achievement Award Silver Urania (organised with the homonym literary headline) to a master of science fiction.

Trieste Science+Fiction Festival is organized by the Film and Audiovisual Research and Experimentation Centre La Cappella Underground in collaboration with and supported by MiBACT – Direzione Generale Cinema, Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia, Comune di Trieste, Università degli Studi di Trieste, Fondazione Benefica Kathleen Foreman Casali, associazione Casa del Cinema di Trieste.