About Me

Something about me....


It’s funny how life can change and bring you somewhere you have never expected to be. I has always imagined me coming to London to study or work, but I never imagined me writing for Cine-Excess and finally being part of a film festival.

Simi-Excess: From behind the scenes of the 2010 Armani Fashion Runway in Paris, to an insider of the Cine-Excess International Cult Film Festival in London.

In 2010 I was working for Giorgio Armani press office dealing with journalists and stylists from Paris, London and more. In few months I got quickly absorbed in the glamour of the fashion industry!

I was in between the hard work at the office during the day and events and parties at night where I had the chance to met many notorious people of the Parisian jet set. Nevertheless, fashion was not enough for me so I started being voluntarily involved in the organisation of different film festivals. However, it is only thanks to my work-experience at the Italian Cultural Institute of London that I ended up to be part of the Cine-Excess International Film Festival. It has immediately captured my interest for its closeness to the elaborate subculture of fandom.

It may sound like a big change, but in the end what has always interested me was the festival experience in itself. The idea of a physical gathering of people, all in one space, all sharing the experience, all sharing the same passions, all sharing the experience of being fans…. in a different way.

In fact, every single person with his or her attendance and this sense of personal passion brings to the festival something special: the uniqueness of each film goer makes possible the formation of the heterogeneous crowd that ritually gathers for a festival. No matter if it's a fashion runway or a film festival. The festival in itself is a unique cultural event. The space for a real, rather than virtual social network of "like-minded" people to share the same energy and the same emotional feeling.

I have always nurtured a passion for cinema since I was 10 years old, when I sat there watching my first Tarantino movie. Tarantino’s cult epics helped me fall in love with Cinema! Now as an adult, I can’t wait to share this fascination with movie images with the festival audience. What is incredible about this experience is that the audience is mersmerized when looking at the same pictures and absorbed in the same screen, but viewing it in their own different ways. In fact, in the magic space of the movie theater everybody brings their own life, their own perspective. Something unique that can't be duplicated.

Movies, in the same way as books, tell a story and they do it in a 35mm film, 300 metres long equal to 1000 steps in which your life and your imagination take a walk into someone else life and creativity. Similarly to movies, fashion shows are events that bring you into someone else's clothes, into someone else's style.

Recently I watched Notebook on Cities and Clothes, and Wim Wenders’ reflection on fashion has particularly fascinated me. In talking about the project of shooting a documentary feature on fashion he says: "The world of fashion. I'm interested in the world, not in fashion! But, maybe I was too quick to put down fashion. Why not look at it without prejudice? Why not examine it like other industry, like movies for example?"

"Maybe fashion and cinema have something in common" 

Both worlds, cinema and fashion, deal with society and its changing nature. They explore it and express its movement or in other words cultural trends. That is why I fell, presumably like you, so close to film and clothes. They document, express and make us seen, and allow us to wear and enjoy the era we are living in.

Simona Patrizi