Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival: Handle with care

The #12 Edition will take place from September 27th to October 2nd

Having reached its 12th edition, the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival is renegotiating its space in the calendar of domestic cultural events, continuing to explore and promote innovative experiments, through a wide selection of short and feature films premiered in Romania. Between September 27 and October 2, the event dedicated to new forms of exploration of artistic language brings some of the most challenging cinematic experiments of the year to Cinema Elvire Popesco, Cinemateca Eforie and the National Museum of Contemporary Art.

The curatorial proposal of the 2022 edition, presented under the title Handle with care, questions the state of fragile balance – defining for the historical moment we are going through, through more than 70 cinematographic works included in the selection, which boldly explore the limits of the cinematic language . Among the surprises this year we cand find the premiere screening in Romania of De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the mesmerizing documentary presented in the Quinzaine des Realisateurs section of the prestigious Cannes film festival.

For the first time in the festival’s history, this year’s edition will include a new competition section dedicated to feature films made by filmmakers who are on their first or second feature film. The new section brings together 7 films that have distinguished themselves in the last year on the festival circuit through innovative formal approaches that explore new possibilities of the cinematic language expression.

BIEFF.12 subscriptions, which provide unlimited access to all screenings and events in the edition’s program, have gone on sale and are available starting today on the Eventbook platform.

An intersection of innovation and total freedom of artistic expression, BIEFF continues its mission to promote unique perspectives on topics relevant to the context we are facing, building a safe space for debate and dialogue. The theme that will define the festival experience in 2022 centers on the notion of care understood as a binder for the social and natural, political and cultural fractures and ruptures facing humanity today. Care in response to concern – care for the other, but also for ourselves, care for future generations, care for all living beings.

Handle with care invites reflection towards the way we live, on the values ​​that govern the communities and societies we belong to, but also on the ways in which we can re-imagine the world around us and our interactions with those and what surrounds us in a more sustainable and inclusive manner, with care and respect for otherness.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica – face to face with the state of alterity of our own bodies

From the multi-award-winning creators of films such as Caniba (2017) or Leviathan (2012), we get the chance to see for the first time screening in Romania the documentary De Humani Corporis Fabrica,  – an amazing cinematic expedition inside the human body, presented this year in the selection of the festival of film from Cannes. 5 centuries since in the name of science, the anatomist André Vésale opened the human body for the first time, directors Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor use video footage captured through ultra-modern medical technology to give us a spectacular view from the inside on the functioning of the human body.

“Removing the mystery surrounding the machine that contains our spirit raises the involvement of both the surgeon and the creators of the film to a transcendental level,” emphasizes IndieWire publication, in a welcome chronicle dedicated to the film. Analyzed in depth, the matter from which we are created becomes, in the film, a spectacular painting, whose existence we become aware of only through observation.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica will have a special screening at the closing of the 12th edition of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, on Sunday, October 2.

The 12th edition of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival is organized by the Manekino Cultural Association in partnership with PRINTOR COM.

Project co-financed by Bucharest City Hall through ARCUB as part of the “Bucuresti afectiv” 2022 Program. For detailed information about the financing program of Bucharest City Hall through ARCUB, you can access www.arcub.ro