The 15th International Film Festival Bratislava will be held from 6 to 12 November in five city cinemas – in two theatres of Kino Lumière, in Kino Mladosť, in Kino Nostalgia, and in a newly opened Kino FILM EUROPE. Other venues of the festival screenings will be Batelier, which will roof selected film projections and the accompanying programme of the partner project Danube Art Cargo, and Park Inn Danube Hotel, which will serve as the festival background zone for guest service, accreditation centre and press centre. The 15th IFF Bratislava is a jubilee year of a spectators' favourite international film festival, which annually brings to Bratislava and selected towns a wide range of films belonging to the best and most remarkable of what has been made during the year in the world cinematography.
The Competition of Documentary Films section is a meeting point of several titles of the most acknowledged films of the season. Coordinator of the section, the film critic Pavel Smejkal, says: “Also this year, the section is composed with the ambition to present the visitors the best of the current world production, covering a wide palette of genres, methods, and styles. It is difficult to overlook the fact that the contemporary documentary film has been flourishing; it opens fundamental topics, and at the same time, brings along film language innovations.”
The winner of the Cannes section Un certain regard – The Missing Picture, and probably the most discussed documentary film of the year – The Act of Killing are an interesting duo. Both talk about traumatising events of the modern history and both come across the same problem – how to communicate violence which is so vast that it is beyond human imagination. In The Missing Picture, the director Rithy Panh speaks about the genocide in his native Cambodia from the perspective of the victims, via immovable clay figures and an introspective commentary. The approach of Joshua Oppenheimer and his collaborators is, on the contrary, extrospective – based on observations of the outer manifestations of crowding out and feeling of the guilt for past crimes.
A festival hit of a different kind is a charming film of the Canadian director Sarah Polley Stories We Tell, unveiling an intimate family history and subjective nature of narration at the same time. It was also within family circles where the Portuguese director André Gil Mata found the topic for his Doc Alliance Award winning film, a documentary essay Captivity dealing with space and time limiting a human life. Courageously minimalistic film Manakamana was awarded at the festival in Locarno. The directing duo Spray and Pacho Velez portrait a miscellaneous sample of passengers in a lift to a sacred mountain in Nepal in 11 uninterrupted shots.
The title of David Muñoz's film Another Night On Earth refers to the famous Jarmusch's film. Also in this case, the narration is composed of dialogue miniatures taking place in taxis. Heavy traffic of the night Cairo is the background of discussions about daily problems. The seemingly trivial dialogues reflect expectations and concerns of the people in times of a revolution. The characters of Nick Bentgen's visually captivating observation documentary Northern Light face an economic crisis, which has left visible marks on their small-town community on the north of Michigan and taken people's hopes.
Social changes are documented also in Housemaids of Gabriel Mascaro, who presented himself in the documentary competition of the IFF Bratislava already in 2009 by his film High-Rise. This time, Mascaro gave away cameras to several Brasilian teenagers with the task to shoot women employed by their parents as housemaids. The film was made by editing the material so gained and reflects relics of the colonial past, which still manifests in relationship of families to servants.
All the latest updates and information about The 15th International Film Festival Bratislava will be gradually posted at our official website www.iffbratislava.sk and on Facebook.
15th International Film Festival Bratislava
November 6 – 12, 2013
Main organisers
Ars Nova Association
Partners Production
The Festival is held with the generous financial support of the Slovak Audiovisual Fund and with the support of the MEDIA Programme of the European Union.
COME AND EXPERIENCE IT!
More info: SILVIA TURNEROVÁ
Tel.: +421 2 54 41 06 73; +421 905 708 333; E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
