BIEFF 2018: Embracing the Female Gaze

     The competition program Embracing the Female Gaze challenges taboos and pudicity, defies rules and enters a space which is both conscious and subconscious. The films in this program intend to make a deconstruction and a re-examination of the relationship between word, image and meaning. With attention and wit, their creators make us understand that in order to be able to truly embrace new connotations it is necessary to bridge the distance between spectator and film.  
     In the seductive film Islands, Yann Gonzalez starts with the typical horror genre in which sexual desire is being punished by o monstrous character. In a meta-cinematic turn, the film turns from foe to friend, a friend through which liberated fantasies give birth and enforce one another. The director explores the whole spectrum of carnal and filmic pleasures: of watching, of inciting, of living the fantasy on your own, or becoming part of the fantasy. Islands is the recipient of the Queer Palm Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and of the Trophy of the 2017 Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival.  
     What Happened to Her is a forensic exploration of our cultural obsession with images of the dead woman on-screen. Combining sequences from police films and TV series and one actress` experience of playing the part of a corpse, the director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan offers a meditative critique on this obsession. The visual narrative of the genre, reinforced through intense and pervasive repetition is revealed as a highly structured pageant. Concurrently, the experience of physical invasion and exploitation told by the voice of the actress pierces the fabric of the screened fantasy. The result is recurring and magnetic film cliché laid bare.
     Into All That Is Here goes on to deconstruct “basic human experiences through a combination of noise, imagery and words”, as the visual artist Laure Prouvost herself states in an interview for Sleek Magazine. “I was trying to translate the emotion […] I  wanted to explore ideas of pleasure and anxiety. There was a lot of metamorphosis in this piece. Suddenly you are digging into this hole and then assuming the view of an insect in a cocoon that comes out and wants to swallow everything it sees and then it slowly dies, consumed by consuming. It`s a comment on humanity and the way we consume images.” The film is presented at BIEFF with the support of LUX and it was internationally released during the prestigious Rotterdam International Film Festival.
     This year, the jury of the 2018 BIEFF International Competition is made of: Angelika Ramlow – the representative of Berlinale Forum Expanded and Arsenal Institute for film and video art in Berlin, Bianca Lucas – a programmer of the European Shorts section at the Sarajevo Film Festival and film director; Cristian Neagoe – a Street Delivery curator and the manager of the Cărturești Foundation. The three of them will watch the five films and will decide the awards which will be given on Saturday, March 31, 2018, starting with 20:00, at the Peasant Museum Cinema.
     The annual seminary The Lifespan of Cinematic Experimentation is an event that shouldn`t be missed. The participants will be able to learn from the experience of some professionals of the film industry, the special guests of the festival: the jury members Angelika Ramlow and Bianca Lucas, alongside Ulrich Ziemons, the curator of the Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded program. The event will take place on Saturday, March 31, 2018, starting with 16:30, in the foyer of the French Institute in Bucharest (Bd.Dacia, no.77).
     Free admission, upon seating availability. Please book a seat by writing to pr@bieff.ro.