National Film Museum Exhibition
The Museo Nazionale del Cinema (National Film Museum) of Turin inaugurated its new Video Room with video essays produced by graduate students of the Accademia di Architettura at the Università della Svizzera Italiana, under the instruction of Kevin B. Lee, the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts.
The exhibition was titled Key Words for Key Films, a series of video essays for 2020s cinema. The project takes a deceptively simple approach: students select a single word to capture the essence of a film from the 2020s, then explore this term through multiple definitions paired with carefully chosen film clips. This “cinematic dictionary” method reveals how language and moving images can interact to reflect on both the state of cinema and our world today. The resulting collection forms a moving glossary of our cinematic era.
The project introduces for the first time the video essay as a dynamic and autonomous expressive form within the Museum’s displays. While traditional museum videos typically offer either illustration (film clips visualizing information) or explanation (experts discussing topics), these video essays forge a third path that combines visual analysis with poetic reflection, creating works that both illuminate and surprise.
Here the full list of essays in the program
Read the announcement of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema
Key Words for Key Films – Student Video Essays
Eye: Everything Everywhere All At Once
by Wendy Lin, Hao Liu
Animate: The Boy and the Heron, Flow, Soul, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio and Encanto
by Irina Pandele, Chido Tashayawedu
𐓄𐓟𐓲𐓟 (Fire): Killers of the Flower Moon
by Ramon Savoldelli
Stage: Saltburn
by Daniel Bauer, Theo Müller
Boundary: The Zone of Interest
by Joanna Barbachowska
Restore: Dahomey
by Paul Magnin, Flavia Zorrilla
Camera: No Other Land
by Flavia Mazzarino
Record: Aftersun
by Sarah Däbritz, Andrej Kukic