European films prevail, exotic locations represented by films from Australia, India, Canada and USA

BRNO/CZ – EKOFILM programmers led by Jitka Kotrlová selected 25 competition films out of 207 submissions. The festival jury will award the best films in the following sections: Beauty of Nature, Central European Films and Short Films. Every competition film is also eligible for one of the festival’s special awards: the Minister of the Environment’s Award for the Best Film and the Festival President’s Award. The 47th edition of the International Film Festival focusing on environment will take place from 20th to 23rd October in Brno. The award ceremony will be held on Friday 22nd October at the Faculty of Social Studies of the Masaryk University. The festival theme reflected mainly in its accompanying programme is Green Architecture. 

The 25th Ji.hlava IDFF, a key European documentary film festival, kicks-off in two weeks! Festival visitors can look forward to three hundred films including the latest Czech and international documentary cinema, a unique retrospective of Romanian experimental film, and a section dedicated to the American thinker and essayist Susan Sontag. This year’s Ji.hlava Inspiration Forum will include a discussion with gender studies legend Judith Butler. The 25th Ji.hlava IDFF will take place on October 26–31.

Every year, at the beginning of October, films from all over the world compete for a prestigious place on the program of the Krakow Film Festival.

From 29 May to 5 June and online from 3 to 12 June, the audience at next year’s Krakow Film Festival will get to watch approximately 200 carefully selected films in cinemas. They are going to be presented over several thematic series and 4 competitions: the international documentary competition, the international short film competition, the DocFilmMusic international music documentary competition, and the national competition. As every year, all competition films will be presented in Poland for the first time, and many of them will have their world premieres at the Krakow Film Festival.

The selection includes ten world premieres, nine international premieres and one European premiere, among the slate of 20 debuts. It’s a diverse, global programme of real contrasts and extremes, including everything from musicals to animation, thrillers and dark comedies, as well as a good dose of surrealism and surprisingly many funerals.

Festival Director Tiina Lokk commented, “Let’s face it - making a debut feature film isn’t easy in the best of times. But it’s pressure that makes diamonds. We saw enough debuts, of sufficiently high quality, that we could have filled up two competition programmes of First Features this year. It’s a genuine sadness that we can’t give all of these new directors and their unique films the platform they deserve. What we do have is a real celebration of cinema and a feast for the senses.”

Black Nights Film Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2021 and runs from November 12-28 in Tallinn & Tartu, Estonia. The full programmes of films will be announced at the start of November. International press and professionals will have the opportunity to watch much of the competition programmes online, as well as in press screenings onsite in Tallinn. Find out more about press accreditations here.

From 1 to 14 October, a retrospective of Slovenian films, shot between 1948 and 2018, will take place in the Lisbon Cinematheque in Portugal. A total of twelve Slovenian feature films – from legendary classics to more contemporary works selected by the curators of this Portuguese institution – will be screened.

France Štiglic’s Valley of Peace (1956), which was presented in the Cannes Classics programme in 2016 and subsequently screened at numerous festivals and cinematheques around the world, was selected as the opening film.

Valley of Peace / Dolina miru - Foto1_ Lado Sazonov_arhiv Slovenske kinoteke

REVELATORY RETROSPECTIVE OF THE ROMANIAN EXPERIMENTAL SCENE

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 After many months of preparations and curatorial visits to Romanian archives and galleries we are coming up with this year’s unique retrospective of 24 experimental films created in underground conditions in Romania during the period 1968–1989. The Conference Fascinations: Romania retrospective at this year’s Ji.hlava IDFF will bring many cinematic discoveries including a poetic film set in an industrial environment, The Alert (1969), by Mircea Sauçan which will be screened outside Romania for the first time.