March 20, 2014 - 15:28 AMT
Rai Cinema, Giorgio Armani team for Films of City Frames initiative

Italy’s Rai Cinema and fashion designer Giorgio Armani have teamed up on Films of City Frames, a combined philantropic/promotional initiative that will finance shorts by six selected students or young graduates at international films schools, Variety reported.

The selected films schools are NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in New York; USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles; the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome; the National Film and Television School in Londra; the Ecole Superieure de Realisation in Paris; and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.

Each film school will select a young director who will shoot a short according to the following specifications: the goal is to depict “fragments of life, emotions, gazes and signs captured and filtered” through Giorgio Armani Frames of Life eyeware, as a Rai Cinema statement put it.

The first selected young director is Centro Sperimentale graduate Piero Messina, one of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s assistants on “The Great Beauty,” the pic that recently scooped the Oscar for foreign-language film.

Rai Cinema, which is the film unit of Italian pubcaster RAI will oversee the production process.