For the 2024 Edition, the theme was Metamorphosis:

Every year, Orvieto Cinema Fest dedicates a special space to the world of illustration and visual arts, a well-established event for the festival that aims to broaden its scope beyond the cinematic language. As in previous years, it starts with a reflection that can address the questions of our time and, in turn, encourages us to ask new and equally relevant questions: the central theme of metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis, the law of transformation that pervades the succession and flow of forms, sets the deep rhythm of universal life.

For Ovid, metamorphosis is the law governing existence, which is continuously mutable, uncertain, lived by humans at the mercy of events, victims of chance, and the whimsical arbitrariness of the gods. It is a world marked by the gap between deceptive appearances and actual realities, in which people get lost.

For Apuleius, metamorphosis signifies curiosity, experimentation, and the pursuit of knowledge through magic and the supernatural. This experience is characterized by an underlying ambiguity represented by the dual identity of Lucius, man and donkey, in which two consciousnesses coexist without value judgments.

For Kafka, metamorphosis signifies nightmare and alienation; after all, Gregor is a child of modernity and lives the contradictions of his time. The transition from reality to a fantastical dimension, the awareness that another possible world might exist, generates terror. The nightmare stems from the certainty that the transformation process is irreversible and that the new condition must be measured against reality.

All the characters in literature experience the magic of transformation with curiosity, with a spirit of adventure, of knowledge, with terror, but also with wonder: the same wonder we feel in a dark room, illuminated by a rectangle of light, where fantasy becomes reality, fear becomes courage, hatred becomes love, and ideas become messages.

And for humanity today, what does metamorphosis imply? Is it a challenge, an opportunity, a philosophy of life, or a threat? Which metamorphoses do we face with more enthusiasm, and which are the most urgent and necessary? Personal, social, environmental, cultural, technological metamorphoses: our present is a magma to be shaped, and through the artists who participated in our competition, we want to explore its forms and directions.

Below are the 15 finalists and the contest winner.