BIEFF.15 kicks off today: Seven days full of innovative films, meetings with renowned filmmakers, and unmissable events

Now in its 15th edition, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival kicks off today, September 22, with a program of more than 60 short and feature films presented in national premiere, encounters with renowned filmmakers, and events dedicated to both the industry and film lovers. Until September 28, BIEFF.15 aims to celebrate, at Cinema Elvire Popesco, Cinemateca Eforie, and Cinema Union, under the theme Common Ground, the importance of community and care for one another and for the surrounding world. The schedule, as well as tickets and general passes, are available on the festival website and on Eventbook.ro.

48 films in the BIEFF.15 competitions

No fewer than 48 films will be presented this year in the official competitions of BIEFF.15. In the International Feature Competition, dedicated to filmmakers at their first or sophomore feature, five films presented over the past year at prestigious festivals such as Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto, or FIDMarseille stand out through their diversity and formal inventiveness. Among them are The Seasons by Maureen Fazendeiro, a journey through the history and stories of the Alentejo region in southern Portugal, the Canadian film Levers, by Rhayne Vermette, set during a one-day total solar eclipse, and Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued by American filmmaker Julian Castronovo, a detective thriller that begins with the real case of New York gallerist Eli Sakhai, convicted for forging multiple works of art. Also featured are MACDO, a family drama inspired by 1990s telenovela aesthetics from Mexican filmmaker Racornelia, and Punku, by Peruvian director J.D. Fernández Molero, an intense coming-of-age drama with influences from David Lynch and Maya Deren, taking viewers along the Amazon, into the heart of the Matsigenka tribe.

The International Short Film Competition brings together 31 provocative films from 26 countries, directed by some of the most acclaimed emerging filmmakers of the moment. Organized into six thematic programs that interrogate and deconstruct the gaze and conventional cinematic modes of representation, this year’s selection invites the public to engage in dialogue and critical reflection on current socio-political issues: from social and ecological collapse caused by colonial and extractivist practices, to analyses of various modes of relating (between people, but also with technology and artificial intelligence), and the processing of abuses and traumas – individual, historical, and war-related. After the screenings of Common Ground, Memory Palaces, Invention of the Self, I Feel Like I Know Her, and Paranoid Power, audiences can also take part in Q&A sessions with filmmakers Theo Panagopoulos (The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing), Ginan Seidl (J-N-N), Basim Magdy (The Birds Choose the Cards), Firat Yucel (happiness), Lilith Grasmug (Some Of You Fucked Eva), Tuisku Lehto (Arcturus), and Dorian Jespers (Loynes).

From queer sci-fis to sensorial meditations and highly personal video journals, thirteen remarkably diverse Romanian short films, eleven of them directed by women, will be screened this year in the National Competition, across two programs presented on September 27 at Cinemateca Eforie, each followed by a Q&A session with the filmmakers.

The El Pampero Cine collective and Arsenal on Location, special screenings at BIEFF.15

The Argentine collective El Pampero Cine, a formidable presence in contemporary independent cinema, will be the subject of a special focus at BIEFF.15, with four acclaimed works from their catalog of over 25 films produced in the past two decades screened in Bucharest for the first time. Among them are Trenque Lauquen, named the Best Film of 2023 by Cahiers du Cinéma, La Flor, one of the longest films ever made, with a duration of 13 and a half hours, and Clementina, a meta-comedy shot during the height of the pandemic. On September 24, directors Laura Citarella, Mariano Llinás, and Agustín Mendilaharzu will also hold a masterclass at the UNATC Cinema Hall about the collective’s unique working method, defined by a way of producing films with extremely limited resources that encourages full creative and political independence. For the screening of Folk Traditions of the Land, the three will be joined by musician and composer Pablo Dacal, one of the protagonists of the documentary.

The collaboration between BIEFF and the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin continues this year with two Arsenal on Location screenings, inviting audiences to discover and embrace the communal potential of cinema. The program Times of Radical Change – Yugantar Collective, presented in partnership with F-Sides, is dedicated to the activity of the feminist film collective Yugantar, which was active in 1980s India and involved in several movements of organization and solidarity among women in both urban and rural environments. Meanwhile, Eastern Elegies – Reflection of a Bygone Era questions the dominant ideological narratives in former Eastern Bloc states and the Soviet Union, while exploring a set of aesthetic and political convergences specific to this geopolitical space, and how these are understood and revisited from a contemporary perspective.

The newest films by directors Kamal Aljafari and Alexandre Koberidze, With Hasan in Gaza and Dry Leaf, will also receive special screenings as the opening and closing films of BIEFF.15, just one month after their world premieres in Locarno. In With Hasan in Gaza, Aljafari turns to his own archive, using video footage shot in 2001 during a trip to the region alongside Hasan, a local guide, to create “a tribute to Gaza and its inhabitants, to everything that has been erased and that returned to my mind in this urgent moment of Palestinian existence – or non-existence.” Dry Leaf finds the Georgian filmmaker known for What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? returning to his lo-fi roots, with the feature shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson phone discontinued in 2011.

International workshop for young curators hosted for the first time by BIEFF

This year, BIEFF is hosting for the first time the international European Workshop for New Curators, an initiative of The European Network for Film Discourse (The END), an international network of festivals that BIEFF joined in 2025. The workshop is coordinated by Daniella Shreir, film critic, curator, and founder of the initiatives Another Gaze and Another Screen, and aims to support the training and professionalization of a new generation of curators specializing in short-film programming.