Garda International AV Festival

Howard Bagshaw ARPS, MPAGB

It is, without doubt, the most glorious setting for an AV Festival. Lake Garda is beautiful in June, the sun glistens off the water while ferries full of expectant passengers drift back and forward across the lake. And there is a heady scent of the mountains, the Mediterranean and Italian coffee everywhere. The festival is held in the Palazzo Pincini Carlotti, with AVs being shown on a very large screen with admirable sound equipment. Although ofcially organised by ‘Gruppo fotograco lo scatto B.F.I.’, most of the hard work seems to be done by Lorenzo de Francesco, Director of Audiovisual Services for FIAP. This year, I joined Lorenzo and Fulvio Merlak (Honorable President of the Italian photographic federation), to judge the 71 entries.

We had been sent the AVs in advance and scored them all before the event, courtesy of WeTransfer. Lorenzo uses a 10 point scale correlated to letter grades of A to C- . Sharing the grades showed that we were in quite good agreement for many, but there were a few where we were far apart. For me this was often because of language difculties, particularly where an AV relied on a deep understanding of idiomatic French or Italian. Fortunately, once we sat and watched them together at the event, we could have long conversations about meaning and detail. And because there was hardly any audience and no authors present most of the time, that discussion could happen after each AV.

No audience, that was the sad thing for me. Last year there had been a dozen Brits, making up most of the audience. This year, for various reasons, Carole and I were the only Brits there. The positive side of this was there was little need to worry about time; start when things were ready, watch some AVs, drift down to the lakeside for a coffee, a light lunch or an icecream and repeat over two days until all the AVs were seen and judged. But what of the AVs? There was a good international mix, 10 countries represented, unsurprisingly with Italy most prolic, but UK in second place with 8 authors submitting 13 works. A lot of discussion about the merits of each, but in the end, of the top 6 medal winners, 3 were Italian, 2 from the UK and a French sequence. I was of course totally unbiassed in my judgement but was delighted when we awarded second place and the FIAF Gold medal to Il Miracolo di Matteo Loney by Judith Kimber from Northern Ireland. The winning AV was from Il Triangolo Magico Multivisione, a group of three Italian workers, with Caramelle. I hope you get to see this AV sometime; it powerfully and sensitively addresses a serious issue facing the Catholic Church. Though we didn’t consider it while judging, in retrospect I nd it interesting that the top three awards went to monochrome sequences, all narration-free. Congratulations also to Richard Brown for The Cost of War which won the FIAP Bronze medal and to all the other authors who had their work accepted. For all the results see: http://www.af.net/diaf/wp-content/ uploads/2016/02/2019-238-Garda-General-Catalog.pdf