by Chiara Ghidelli
In its 2026 edition, Concorto Film Festival presents the Bodies of Melancholia focus, a selection dedicated to exploring irregular emotions and people who live on the margins of society, born from increasingly unsustainable cultures and lifestyles. The focus explores how the body somatizes these forms of unease: tension, impulses, fragility, and resilience inscribe themselves in physicality, transforming it into a visible place of conflict and inner expression. From this starting point, Bodies of Melancholia aims at investigating these inner landscapes through the body, observing how emotions and invisible pressures can shape gestures, movements, postures, and transformations.
This selection reveals individuals burdened by complex identities which perceive themselves as cumbersome and out of place, and which find expression in jolts, impulses and bodily outbursts. Human, non-human, and super human: not only portraits, but also poetic places made of symbols, flesh, and atmosphere.
Bodies of Melancholia maps these embodied emotional territories that result from sociocultural dynamics that cross individuals and relationships in rural and urban contexts, and depicts a contemporary society marked by a progress, but often devoid of empathy, where the body becomes both an archive and a visible expression of contemporary discomfort.
Films featured:
Ali, Adnan Al Rajeev, Bangladesh, Philippines, 2025, fiction, 15′
A Very Straight Neck, Neo Sora, Japan, 2025, fiction, 10′
Ce Qu’on Laisse Derrière (What We Leave Behind), Alexandra Myotte, Jean-Sébastien Hamel, Canada/Québec, 2025, animation, 10′
Challenges of a Solitary Mind, Astrid Rothaug, Austria, 2025, animation, 3′
Desdoblándome (Unfolding Me), Natalia Pájaro, Mexico, 2025, experimental animation, 7′
El Cuerpo De Cristo (Corpus Christi), Bea Lema, Spain, 2025, animation, 12′
Former Cult Member Hears Music For The first Time, Kristoffer Borgli, Norway, USA, 2020, mocumentary, 12′
Four Percent, Monika Maslon, Germany, Argentina, Poland, 2025, animated documentary, 13′
Hypersensible, Martine Frossard, Canada , 2025, animation, 9′