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The Festival

Festival Concept

Founded in 2010 by film director and university professor Copel Moscu and Golden Bear winning director Adina Pintilie, BIEFF aims to promote highly innovative films and filmmakers with strong personal views on contemporary reality, which also daringly explore the boundaries of cinematic language. A cinema of total creative freedom and lack of compromise.

At the heart of BIEFF’s film program are three wide-ranging competitive sections that bring together diverse short and feature-length films, covering a variety of stylistic and thematic approaches.

The longest-running competitive section of the festival, the INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION showcases each year a selection of the most provocative and innovative recent visual experiments, curated into thematic programs which aim to probe contemporary realities and create a space for reflection and dialogue.

Starting from 2021, a NATIONAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION was introduced to the festival program, born out of a desire to provide a platform for supporting and promoting up and coming Romanian filmmakers interested in exploring and experimenting with avant-garde cinematic formats.

A year later, BIEFF inaugurated it’s International Feature Film Competition, a section dedicated to emerging  filmmakers, bringing together a carefully curated selection of first and second feature films that received recognition on the international festival circuit.

The festival program is complemented annually by special programs curated in partnership with prestigious festivals and institutions, as well as by Q&A sessions, panels or masterclasses designed to create a context for conversation between filmmakers and audiences.

During its fourteen years of existence, BIEFF was honored to collaborate with some of the major international film festivals and institutions in the area of avant-garde cinema and visual art, recognized worldwide for their consistent creative support of innovative, radical filmmaking and visual art such as QUINZAINE DES RÉALISATEURS – Cannes Film Festival, BERLINALE Forum Expanded – Berlin International Film Festival, OBERHAUSEN International Film Festival,  ROTTERDAM International Film Festival, ARSENAL – Institute for Film and Video Art Berlin,  EYE Film Institute Netherlands, CENTRE POMPIDOU – MUSÉE NATIONAL D’ART MODERNE.

BUCHAREST INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL BIEFF was created under the patronage of the National University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” and the National University of Arts Bucharest.

Festival Board

Adina Pintilie

Co-founder

Co-founder and former Artistic Director of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF (2010-2019). A graduate of the National University of Theatre and Film Bucharest, filmmaker and curator Pintilie works on the boundary between fiction, reality and visual art. In the new Romanian cinema landscape, her body of work stands out through a highly personal visual style, daring cinematic experimentation and an uncompromising exploration of human psychology. Her first feature TOUCH ME NOT won the Golden Bear and the GFWW First Feature Award at Berlinale 2018, followed by an extensive festival circuit and cinema distribution in more than 35 countries.

Oana Ghera

Artistic Director

Oana Ghera is the Artistic Director of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF) since 2020. She is a film curator, cultural manager and cinema educator with an academic background in scriptwriting and film studies.  Industry Coordinator of the European Short Pitch starting with the 2023-2024 edition.  In 2024, she joined the pre-selection committees of Go Short and Vienna Shorts and she participated in the curation of the market catalogue of SFC | Rendez-vous Industry, in the context of the Cannes Film Festival. Previously, she was a co-programmer for the NexT International Film Festival (2016 – 2019).

 

Ioana Gonțea

Festival Manager

Ioana Gonțea is a multidisciplinary cultural manager and independent producer. She works in theatre, visual arts, and cultural education. Since 2024, she is the festival manager of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival BIEFF. In 2023 she worked within the European Capital of Culture – Timișoara 2023 as Operational Manager of the Art Encounters Foundation. In 2019, as a result of winning the Gabriela Tudor Scholarship for Cultural Management, she co-founded the FIR Cooperative. She was also the producer of the Bucharest International Theater Platform, of the Romanian-French theatrical co-production “Déracines” and coordinated a series of projects for children and adolescents.

Team - BIEFF 2024

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