Romanian documentaries at the Riga Film Festival

    Tomorrow the Latvian audience will have the opportunity to watch Romanian documentaries and will be able to get to know the history of the Astra Film Festival, during a day dedicated to the Romanian documentaries at the Riga Pasaules Film Festival.
     The short film 

A Short History of Astra Film Festival/ O scurtă istorie a Astra Film Festival, directed by Carmen Lidia-Vidu, which renders the evolution of the most long-lasting non-fiction film festival in Romania that reached its 25th editions, will delight the viewers of the Kino Bize cinema in Riga. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Dumitru Budrala, the founder and director of Astra Film and Csilla Kato, program director of AFF.

     Dumitru Budrala will also attend a Q&A, talking to the audience of the Riga festival about the details behind the camera and the story of his documentary The Curse of the Hedgehog / Blestemul ariciului, which explores for five years t

he cruel reality and the surviving fight for survival of a Roma family.
     The Latvia

n Festival viewers will be able to watch offline episodes of two videochat models and what impact has such a job on the emotional and social level in the film Phoenixxx, directed by Mihai Dragolea; last autumn this film was awarded for Best Research for a documentary at the Astra Film Festival. Another production in the 2017 AFF, Petrila Planet / Planeta Petrila, directed by Andrei Dăscălescu, can also be seen on the big screen of the Kino Bize cinema. The film follows the fight of an activist-artist to stop the demolishing of the Petrila coalmine and his mission of preserving it and turning it into a cultural space.
“We are happy about the presence of the Romanian films in international festivals and we are happy to take to Riga the 25 years-story of our festival. AFF has been for 25 years an important cultural institution in the context of the Romanian and international documentary film industry, which proved to be a launching platform for the documentary film production, a devoted supporter of the Romanian film and a reference point on the East-European film map” Dumitru Budrala said.