On Friday 17 October (3:30 pm, Teatro Studio Gianni Borgna, Auditorium Parco della Musica) the Rome Film Festival will dedicate a special event to the project Short Food Movie – Feed Your Mind, Film Your Planet, promoted by the Fondazione Cinema per Roma (which has organized the Festival since 2007) and by the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia for Expo Milano 2015. Its goal is to gather, on the website, a collection of videos lasting no longer than 30 to 60 seconds, submitted from around the world and inspired by the theme of the Expo: “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”. 

The programme will include a series of screenings and a round table discussion with the participation of Dario Franceschini (Minister for the Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism), Eduardo Rojas-Briales (Commissioner-General of the United Nations for Expo Milano 2015), Giovanni Marinelli (Councilor for Culture Roma Capitale), Roberto Arditi (Director of Institutional Affairs Expo Milano 2015), Roberto Faenza (Director Cinemonitor New Media Portal, Università La Sapienza di Roma), Caterina D’Amico (Fondazione CSC), Diamara Parodi Delfino (Fondazione Cinema per Roma), Sabina Fiorentini (Associazione Italiana Food Blogger).

During the event, there will be a showing of the video Planet-Life-Save by Andrio Robert (Brazil), winner of the first contest that was launched in recent months by Short Food Movie and open to all the users of the website, who were invited to vote for their favourite video among the 160 submitted from 28 countries. A selection of the most interesting videos uploaded onto the portal will also be shown. This will be followed by a presentation of the new Short Food Movie project, which includes a new contest for the videos voted by the Jury and the web users, to be held from 10 November 2014 to 10 March 2015. There will be a round table discussion moderated by Laura Delli Colli, journalist and author, to explore the theme of the Universal Exposition of Milan “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” and in particular the relationship between “Cinema and Food”.

"I am convinced that the film industry can also make an important contribution to the issue of food safety; film is a tool particularly well suited to raising the public's awareness of one of the greatest challenges facing the world today and spreading the message globally," declared Maurizio Martina, Minister for Agricultural Food and Forestry Policies, with authority for Expo Milano 2015.

Short Food Movie is one of the four global projects selected by Expo Milano 2015 to promote the event around the world in collaboration with the United Nations project “The Zero Hunger Challenge”. The author of the winning video in the “Zero Hunger Challenge” category voted by the users of the website, Lybomir Petrov (Bulgaria), will be a guest of the 34^th World Food Day celebrations on 16 October at the headquarters of the FAO in Rome.

The goal of Short Food Movie is to use the tools offered by new technologies to create social awareness on the themes explored by the Universal Exposition in Milan in 2015. Authors from around the world, from videomakers to amateurs, can therefore offer their personal contribution to this planetary event by making a short video, no longer than 30 to 60 seconds, with any device they choose (videocamera, camera, smartphone, tablet or anything else) on the theme of “Nutrition-Life”. The videos will become part of the great video-installation in Pavilion Zero of Expo Milano 2015, curated by Davide Rampello.

The most common formats are accepted: AVI, MPG, MPEG, MOV, MP4, WMV. The material must be by and no later than 10 March 2015 at www.shortfoodmovie.expo2015.org, the website translated into seven different languages (Italian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Chinese). During the first months of the project, the portal was consulted by over 30,000 individual users with 150,000 page views.