Francesca Floris

Francesca Floris (Oristano, 1992) is a photographer and filmmaker with a deep knowledge of classical and liberal arts subjects and with previous work experience in fields as theatre and music. In 2010 Francesca was part of the Venice International Film Festival Youth Jury during the 67th edition of the event. The jury is composed of 20/24 people selected between over 6000 students. During high school, Francesca received writing and drawing education from Italian comic books writer, Stefano Enna (The Walt Disney Company, Mattel Co., Play Press, Soleil). She moved to London in 2011, to attend Brunel University, where she met and started working with Kristijonas Dirse, with whom she made her first documentary film, "Islands" (2014). In 2012, in London, she started the Flora's Room project, which was originally supposed to be a YouTube show for kids. In September 2014, Francesca moved to the US for a year to study Media Management at The New School in New York. She was awarded the Dean's Merit Scholarship. In April 2015 she was accepted with a merit-based scholarship as an MFA candidate at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, but could not enroll. In December 2018, she graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, while working on the sets of important Italian productions. Two of the short films she produced during her studies at CSC were selected for the Venice International Film Critics' Week, two for Camerimage and one for Cortinametraggio. From 2017 to 2021, Francesca studied and graduated in Visual Anthropology (master's degree) at the University of Siena, while working in the field of animation and VFX (in productions such as Paramount Pictures' "Mission: Impossible 7", Rainbow's "44 Cats" and HBO's "My Brilliant Friend 2" and "The New Pope"). Always attracted by technical experimentation and the mix of real and fantastic, over the years at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome, Francesca trained as an experimental photographer, giving life to projects such as "Olympus 50", "The White Stage" and "The World of Las", promoted by magazines such as "l'Espresso" and exhibited in Brera and other important Italian cultural centers. Her master's degree thesis at the University of Siena, based on the project "The World of Las", starts from a reflection on "Camera Lucida" by Roland Barthes and "Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico" by Franco Vaccari. An essay about the experiment, including the full story of "The World of Las" (2019) was published by Officina Libraria and presented at the Santa Teresa Media Library (Brera) in Milan in February 2019. "We Are Not Alone", her first animation work, is a short adaptation of a chapter of "The World of Las". In the summer of 2020, Francesca won her first prize for a feature film (Best Documentary at the Riviera International Film Festival) with the documentary "Strike!", a film focused on the Fridays For Future protests in Europe and the waste emergency in Rome, directed together with two friends of her, P. Jellinek and D. Petrosino. In December 2020, "Strike!" was also awarded Best Feature Film by the Student Jury at the Terraviva Film Festival in Bologna.