Draft:Milano di Carta

Milano di Carta is an Italian experimental short film created by filmmaker and artist Gianmarco Donaggio. The work gained international recognition following its European release in 2021. It has been showcased at prominent international film festivals and contemporary art museums56. In January 2022, the film was selected as one of the ten representative Italian works of 2021. , part of the "Panoramica 21" collection, which highlighted films noted for their cinematic experimentation and socio-cultural impact. The collection was presented at an extensive exhibition featuring Italian art films at Palazzo delle esposizioni in 2022.

Description
"Milano di Carta" is aligned with Donaggio's cinematic style, centering on the exploration of the cinematic image and its motion as its central theme. The filmmaker articulates the film experience as a dynamic encounter, a performative endeavor intended to remain independent from other artistic mediums such as literature, painting, and music9. In line with avant-garde cinema, the emphasis is placed on the viewer's experience of the work rather than the depicted subject or concept.

Thematically, the film presents a series of billboards filmed across Milan. However, rather than displaying anticipated monumental paper prints, the billboards feature unexpected elements. Notably, these elements reveal themselves to be microscopic projections of the original billboard advertisements. The overlaying of image layers in the film lends itself to multifaceted interpretations. During the 5th Laterale Film Festival, an annual international event in Cosenza, "Milano di Carta" was described as follows:

"What is left of advertising when it is shred, when the game of the ephemeral on the ephemeral on advertising boards stops, tear after tear, paper after paper? Naked screens, that are not showcases anymore, that do not search for numbers, consent, or a market. The filmic act, then, consists of casting the microscopic texture of paper and its fibre on advertising boards, switching the relationship between big and small, between depth and width. The gaze radiates phosphenes, ripples. It prefers dust to figures, the unknown to dimensions, quiet sound to clamour, extension to objects. It opposes epiphany and wonder to the clarity of vision."