Zsuzsanna Király, interview with the new creative director of MASO #3 at the 39th Bolzano Film Festival

Presented at the Industry Days of the 39th Bolzano Film Festival Bozen, MASO #3  – Short Film Training Programme has officially launched its third edition. Created by IDM Film & Music Commission Südtirol and the Bolzano Film Festival Bozen, with the support of the Cultural Offices of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano and a network of Italian and international partners, MASO is an intensive training programme that supports short film projects from development through to production. Nine teams of filmmakers, eighteen participants in total, will be selected to develop and produce their short films under the guidance of international experts. The call for entries for MASO #3 is open from today until 30 June 2026 on the IDM Film & Music Commission Südtirol website.

A new creative director

Zsuzsanna Király takes over the creative direction of MASO for its third edition,  bringing with her a wealth of experience in both production and workshop facilitation. She has followed the programme since its very beginning, witnessing how IDM and the festival built it at remarkable speed with fantastic partners, and how her predecessor , Enrico Vannucci, shaped its early identity. For Király, stepping into this role felt both natural and exciting. “A workshop like this is truly special in the short film making world,” she says, “because it combines development and production input for a creative team of producer, director and screenwriter — a well-rounded, cross-disciplinary attempt not just to give expert guidance but to strengthen the teams and the ideas.”

Bringing Space

What Zsuzsanna Király most wants to bring to MASO #3 is something deceptively simple: space. Space for concentration, for communication, for each step of the filmmaking process to be properly developed before moving to the next. “What you didn’t fix in the script you cannot fix in the editing,” she says, invoking one of the most fundamental truths of filmmaking. Her goal is to slow things down in the best possible sense, in order to create an environment where ideas and teams can strengthen together in the early phases of development and pre-production, working with curiosity, humour and genuine interest in each other’s work.

A group effort

MASO is structured as a team participation programme, and that structure is deeply intentional. Each participant knows about the work of all the other participants because, as Zsuzsanna Király puts it, “more brains know more, more hearts feel more.” Filmmaking, she insists, is a group effort that lives from shared experience. The programme is designed not only to produce films but to make the making of them a joyful, collaborative process, one in which the conversation between participants is as valuable as the guidance of the tutors.

What the new generation of filmmakers is looking for

Asked about the newest generation of filmmakers, Zsuzsanna Király is careful not to generalise. The field is too vast, the approaches too varied. What she observes is both a strong interest in experimentation, in the classic avant-garde sense and in the use of new media, and a continued passion for classic cinema. What matters most, she says, is not the style or the medium but the clarity and passion with which someone works, and the ability of a team to truly understand each other and develop an idea together.