BIEFF 2018 presents the first Spotlight Berlinale in Romania
The 8th edition of the BIEFF Bucharest International Experimental Film festival brings one of the most important events in its educational enterprise is the extending of the partnership with the innovative section of the Berlin International Film Festival – Forum Expanded. Under the formula Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded, this complex focus will include a series of six screenings dedicated to some new and surprising directions at the intersection of film and visual art. The Spotlight is organized in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Bukarest și Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art and it is curated by Ulrich Ziemons.
“Berlinale Spotlight: Forum Expanded brings together 10 works presented at the 2017 edition of the section Forum Expanded. Under the title The Stars Down to Earth, Forum Expanded 2017 proposed a necessity for re-adjusting one`s gaze to one`s surroundings, for looking and listening as closely as possible. This interest in finding a new grounded perspective on the world is especially prevalent in the multifaceted documentary forms in the Forum Expanded selection.” (Ulrich Ziemons)
Investigating the dissemination of the images of violence on a global level, the spatial construction of the political and economical systems or the anthropocentrism of the film narration, the films in this first Berlinale Spotlight at BIEFF show us how we inscription and mirror the self in everything around us - from nature, to the buildings of the city or the work space – including the humor, the personal oscillations or the uprooting that comes with the human experience.
Set in the dreary nooks of Mumbai`s film industry, stuck between star-cult, superstition and the daily gridlock, Camera Threat explores the ambivalent and sometimes paranoid relationship that this film city has with the moving image itself. The film of the visual artist Bernd Lützeler – who will attend the Q&As after the screenings – mixes more genres, following the Masala Formula, which is extremely popular in the Indian cinema.
Private belongings are material testimonies of personal histories which evoke feelings, thoughts and ideas connected to past experiences. Tashlikh (Cast Off), the film of the visual artist Yael Bartana – presented at BIEFF with the help of the Netherlands Embassy in Bucharest – serves as a platform for both perpetrators and survivors of genocides or ethnic persecutions to confront their personal, material links to the horrors. Studies on the Ecology of Drama, of the famous Finish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, can be seen as a performance for and together with a camera. It is a practical, philosophical and representational meditation on the incapacity of our anthropocentric and descriptive tradition to see beyond the field of humanity.
The colourful architecture of a Qatari town replicates that of venice, Italy. But here, the buildings re empty and the canal`s waters are still. A camera ventures to peek behind the town`s mysterious facades. Turtles Are Always Home is an intimate exploration about the search for a home in a transient world. The director Rawane Nassif will attend the screenings of the film during the BIEFF with the support of the Canadian Embassy and of the Lebanese Embassy in Bucharest.
The film Hashti Tehran portrays the peripheral spaces between urbanity and suburbia just outside the city of Tehran. Daniel Kötter opens up four different spaces of transition on the outskirts and shows parts of Iran that rarely get to be seen to the foreigners.
Details: BIEFF