A crowd in motion — the opening sequence for the Far East Film Festival 2026.

Far East Film Festival is the festival dedicated to Asian cinema, held in Udine every year in the second half of April since 1999 and described as “the richest showcase of Far Eastern cinema in Europe”. For its twenty-eighth edition, from 24 April to 2 May 2026, the festival asked me to create the official opening sequence.

The edition revolved around the idea of a multitude of souls: the Far East as a collection of different stories, roots and lives, and the desire to be together and share an experience in a world marked by fragmentation. American illustrator Andy Rementer, with art direction by Margherita Urbani, translated it into the official poster as a playful, luminous gallery of faces.

The challenge was to start from that image and create an opening sequence faithful to its style and mood — pop, cheerful, positive — but also memorable and scalable: a film to screen before every title in the program and, at the same time, a base from which to draw content for social media and the festival's spaces, from the vertical LED wall in the theater foyer to the horizontal one at the entrance.

I took care of the adaptation of the artwork, the animation of the characters and the adaptation to the different formats, working in After Effects and in constant dialogue with Andy Rementer and Margherita Urbani. To make the characters more expressive I redrew eyes and mouths, widening their expressions without slipping into cartoonish excess or caricature.

With the animation I tried to translate the experience of the festival, at once personal and collective, through movements that go from the single character to the crowd.

The opening sequence becomes a portrait of the festival's audience: many faces, each with its own story and personality, coming together to share the same place and watch the same screen.