From Wednesday 10 April to Tuesday 16 April 2019, goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film will be transforming Wiesbaden for the 19th year running into one of the world’s most important showcases for cinema from Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to top-calibre filmmaking, the festival, hosted by DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, also features a host of innovative virtual reality projects.
For the second year in a row, experimental 360° and virtual reality works will be competing for the Open Frame Award at goEast. The competition, presided over by an expert international jury, is presented and endowed with a prize of 5,000 euros by BHF Bank Foundation. Last year’s winners, the Russian artist duo of Natalya Severina and Denis Semionov, won over the jury with their interactive VR work “Nominal Empire”. The programme brings creatives from Eastern Europe together with an international audience and jury with the aim of developing a vision for the potential and future of VR art and cinema.
Eight interactive installations and 360° projects from Romania, Lithuania, Belarus, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia will be on display in the Open Frame Award exhibition. In the run-up to the festival, the projects can be experienced from Thursday 4 April to Sunday 7 April at DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum via headsets, before moving on to Museum Wiesbaden, where they will be shown during the festival week. Thanks to technical support from HTC Europe, Samsung Germany and INVR, visitors to the exhibition have the opportunity to immersive themselves in the projects at close range.
The international jury is composed this year of Dutch-Iranian VR artist Ali Eslami, Franziska Nori, director of Frankfurter Kunstverein, and Israeli VR curator Tal Haring.
“At goEast, we celebrate artistic freedom and the exploration of new forms for telling stories with virtual reality works. This year, our nominees reconnect with past events by reconstructing them in virtual reality, giving the audience the possibility to explore the environments and make up their own minds,” revealed Georgy Molodtsov, curator of the Open Frame Award, adding: “Social and emotional plots are allowed to unfold through deft, artistic use of the still young medium. We hope that our exhibition and award will play a valuable role in the creators’ efforts to expose their ideas and their works to a wider international audience.”
For more information as well as full descriptions of the individual projects, please visit: www.filmfestival-goeast.de/en/sektionen/Open+Frame+Award/
Press Conference The press conference for the 19th edition of goEast will take place at 11 am on Thursday 4 April at Wiesbaden’s Caligari FilmBühne cinema. We kindly ask that you register in advance to attend.
You can find photo materials for this year’s festival in our download section: www.filmfestival-goeast.de/de/presse/downloads
The full programme for the 19th edition of goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film is available at: www.filmfestival-goeast.de/de/programm
goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film is hosted by DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and made possible with the support of numerous partners. Primary funding partners are the State Capital Wiesbaden, the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts, Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain, ŠKODA AUTO Deutschland, Renovabis, BHF BANK Foundation, Adolf und Luisa Haeuser-Stiftung für Kunst und Kulturpflege, the German Federal Foreign Ministry and Deutsch-Tschechische Zukunftsfonds. Media partners include 3sat, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
