Founded in 2015 the competition welcomes feature films of any genre – be it documentary or fiction, animation or any cross-over experience. The competition is bound by region – the call for entries is addressed to films completed after August 1, 2015 in the Nordic countries, the Baltic countries, Germany, Poland and Russia. The Riga IFF curators will select 8 titles for the competition programme that will be presented to an international jury of cinema professionals during the festival. Besides the Riga IFF Award the films will also compete for a special award from the Riga IFF Youth Jury.
During the Riga IFF 2015 the award was given to the documentary film “The Event” by Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa that poetically depicted the failed coup of August 1991. The jury’s Special Mention was given to Grímur Hákonarson icelandic drama “Rams”.
The Riga IFF await submissions by June 13, full terms and regulations and an online submission form can be found at competition.rigaiff.lv
This year the festival will maintain it’s previous eight-programme structure, incorporating the collaboration with one of Russia’s most prominent documentary film festivals Artdocfest, a joint programme with the national award Lielais Kristaps, a Nordic film panorama “Nordic Highlights” developed together with all the Nordic embassies as well as the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia, and the Danish Cultural Institute in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; the family programme “Kids Weekend”; the retrospective programme “In Kino Veritas”, which will focus on non-narrative cinema to try decipher the ways how our film-watching habits form, a challenge for a discussion on the very grounds on which cinematic language is built; the programme “Riga IFF Selection” will present a view on the most important cinematic events of the year in the film festivals of the world – European and world features that have already or potentially will be awarded in Cannes, Berlin, Rotterdam, Vienna and elsewhere. Off screen the festival will also continue developing it’s professional commitments with the “European Script Meeting”, as well as numerous analytical and creative workshops for film students, discussion panels, national premieres, parties, Q&As, lectures on film and culture.
Parallel to its feature film competition the festival has already issued open-calls to the three competitions within the “Short Riga” segment: International Competition for cutting-edge short films of the world, Baltic Student Competition for student shorts from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that is simultaneously a search for young talent in the region and will engage in in-depth analysis of their work and include workshops and lectures that benefit both the students and the audience, and the Baltic Music Video Competition that is unique to Riga and is spectator to a swift development of the form in the region.
The Riga IFF is run by it’s founded society and is funded largely by the State Culture Capital Foundation (SCCF) and Riga Municipality. The festivals home page can be found at rigaiff.lv and it’s development can be followed at it’s social media outlets – Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
