BIEFF 2022 National Short Film Competition: The new voices of the Romanian cinema claim their place on the big screen
Having reached its 12th edition, the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (September 27 – October 2) continues its mission to promote the new voices of local cinema, bringing to the big screen the best experimental short films signed by authors of Romanian origin in the last year. 12 cinematic works that explore diverse cinematic formulas in surprising and provocative ways are competing for this year’s National Short Film Competition Award
“The time has finally come for a consistent Romanian experimental cinema, and its beginning moment may well be the most exciting, as it is completely uneven, lacking in shared aesthetics. Identity politics, video diary, dance, archival, found footage and so many other thoughts and manners of making this/that kind of cinema were just waiting to overcome their eternal condition of local precedent. The discussion will only start now, in less than three hours – and it promises to be a good one,” emphasizes film critic Călin Boto, associate curator, in relation to the selection of films from the BIEFF 2022 National Competition.
The 12 films included in the National Short Film Competition will be able to be viewed in two distinct programs, which will be presented on October 1, at Cinemateca Eforie. The short films proposed for viewing at this edition will surprise the viewers by the diversity of the topics addressed, by the originality of the discourse, but also by the innovative techniques used by the authors in their creation.
Starting at 19:00, viewers will watch the international premiere of A.I. Poetries of Female and Non-female Beings in Gas Stations at Night, an experimental documentary signed by Cristina Iliescu that explores aspects of the female and non-binary experience using virtual mediation, and will discover Dancen (dir. Corina Adrian), recently presented at Oberhousen, in which a group of dancers choreograph the idea of dysfunctional communication.
In For You Can See No Other, Thea Lazar uses 3D animation to go through a specific history of art: the paintings made by men in which women look at themselves in the mirror to appear “conceited”, and in Being Nina (dir. Adina Mocanu) , a Russian housewife with telekinetic powers who became famous during the Cold War, tells us the “true” story of her life set in southern Romania, in a parallel universe.
A phone conversation about a past relationship offers an intimate insight into the feeling of not belonging in Letitia Popa’s Maybe there is no distance, while Archival Study (Portraits) approaches memory and belonging through 8mm footage, mostly shot by father of director Răzvan Anton, throughout the 70s and 80s.
From 21:00, the second program of Romanian short films presents the international premiere of When Flamingos Fall from the Sky, the newest film by director Dragoș Hanciu.
Alina Manolache returns to BIEFF with 3 Dialogues About the Future, a short film in which three robots discuss life and what it means to be human. The film has its international premiere at BIEFF, competing both in the National Competition and in the International Short Film Competition.
A millennial experiment par excellence, Rural Rumor (dir. Chrystèle Nicot, Antoine Alesandrini) follows the lives of two modern peasants, digital avatars in the flesh, who meet by chance, in a surprising way. In Cutting Hand, Alexandra Tatar offers us a seat at the table where she and her mother, a seasonal worker, enjoy their dinner after a day’s work.
Spectators will also have the opportunity to see Lost Footage (dir. Adrian Țofei), a found footage film made from unfound material, but also Faulty Technologies (dir. Sabina Suru), a work with abstract valences in which the choreography of some hands crosses the blurred images of technologies flaws, a sign that meaning in cinema is often built from formal imperfections.