Annette, the new production signed by the French author Leos Carax, opens the 11th edition of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), this evening. The sold out screening of the film, awarded this year with the Best Director Award at Cannes inaugurates an entire marathon of screenings and special events that until November 21 will transform Bucharest into the capital of avant-garde cinema. Dozens of experimental films will run, during the five days of the festival, at Cinema Elvire Popesco, Cinemateca Union, and the National Museum of Art of Romania, Also starting today, within the Berlinale Forum Expanded Spotlight exhibition, hosted by Mezanin gallery , moviegoers will be able to watch a selection of short films included in the latest edition of the Berlin International Film Festival.
The complete program and access tickets to the BIEFF.11 screenings are available on https://eventbook.ro/festival/bieff.
Are we human? – the theme around which the festival experience was built in 2021, invites the public to reflect on the complexity of human nature and on the aspects that define it. An intersection of innovation and creative freedom, the BIEFF International Competition will bring to the big screen a selection of 34 films from 20 countries and organized discursively in 7 curatorial themes, which can be discovered in screenings scheduled from Wednesday , November 17, and until Saturday, November 20.
For the first time in the history of the festival, 13 short films signed by Romanian directors will be presented in the National Competition, a section that brings together a variety of daring approaches, which propose new forms of exploration of audio-visual language, defying the limits of conventional. The two programs dedicated to local films will be screened at Cinemateca Eforie on Friday, November 19, from 17:00, and on Saturday, November 20, from 17:30. Plastic Semiotic, presented for the first time in Venice, and Caricaturana, presented for the first time in the Corti d’autore section in Locarno – the latest short films signed by director Radu Jude, will also run in these programs, out of competition.
The films awarded at the 11th edition of BIEFF will have a special screening on Sunday, November 21, at 19:00, at Cinema Elvire Popesco. On the same evening, also at 19:00, at the National Museum of Art of Romania, during the special event Golden Shorts, viewers will see for the first time in Romania a selection of outstanding short films awarded in 2021 at Berlinale, Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Locarno and Venice.
The partnership with the independent section in Cannes, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, continues at this edition, bringing on the big screen in Bucharest two of the most appreciated film experiments of the year. On Thursday, November 18, viewers are invited to watch A Night of Knowing Nothing, the debut of director Payal Kapadia, who won the L’Oeil d’or Award for best documentary at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. The Tsugua Diaries (directed by Maureen Fazendeiro, Miguel Gomes), one of the most comforting films made in the pandemic era, will have two special screenings in the capital. The feature film presented at Cannes will run on Friday, at 19:00, at the Cinematheque Eforie, and on Sunday at 16:30, at the Cinema Elvire Popesco.
Another surprise of the edition is the focus dedicated to the Arad group kinema ikon, an emblematic name for the Romanian experimental film scene, active since 1970. The Bucharest public will have the opportunity to discover a selection of the most appreciated works made in the last 50 years, as part of the kinema ikon vintage program, scheduled for Thursday, November 18, at 5:00 pm, at Cinemateca Eforie. On Friday, November 19, starting with 19:00, moviegoers are invited to the National Museum of Art of Romania for a unique performance, an immersive acoustic experience designed by dyslex [dslx] doubled by the screening of the film La revedere (RAMBO), an ironic and provocative film collage.
Berlinale Forum Expanded Spotlight @ Mezanin
Continuing its long-standing collaboration with BIEFF, Forum Expanded presents at this edition a new selection of experimental films and video works included in the latest edition of the Berlinale. Six works investigating institutional and traditional systems of power and division can be explored between November 17-21, in a unique exhibition organized at Mezanin. Until Friday, November 19, the space will be open to visitors, with free access, between 14:00 and 20:00, and on weekends, the exhibition can be visited between 10:00 and 20:00.
At the heart of this selection are diverse places and contexts: a suburban high school on the outskirts of Lisbon serves as an incubator of creation and reflection around what cinema might mean today, a roller coaster ride on Black Lives Matter Boulevard in Washington DC poetically recalls the social tensions that have marked recent years, the border between Mexico and the US is the background of a unique performance that proposes a political mapping of power relations in America over the past two decades, while documenting an ancient fertility ritual that continues to be practiced in a village in southern Italy, it raises questions about a possible new direction for the evolution of humanity. In the same spirit, an exterior view of a cave on the island of Jeju in South Korea and a unique montage of images of copper and cobalt mines in the Congo serve as pretexts to talk about the history of colonial exploitation and political and personal issues, which inevitably escapes representation in the mainstream.
Varied in style and content, these films are united at the same time by a poetic and penetrating look, revealing the way in which history intertwines with violence and social conventions.
Forum Expanded is organized by Arsenal – the Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin, through whose distribution efforts the selected works continue to be available for viewing after the festival, in new platforms and exhibition contexts that contribute to increasing their visibility.