Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival has reached a new edition and the theme is Through The Looking Glass. Memory, personal boundaries, public space and anxieties that arise in the public space are just a few of the topics addressed by the films presented at this edition.

Films in Frame magazine, in partnership with BIEFF, is organizing a give-away this year. All you have to do is follow this link on Facebook, follow the steps in the post and you can win two festival passes.

The festival will take place between November 6-10, and Roy Andersson’s latest film, About Endlessness, awarded with Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice IFF, will be screened in national premiere on the opening evening.

This year’s edition includes several important events and programs, such as:

Caught in the Frame – Five short films presented in the parallel section of Cannes Film Festival, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs; political, social, geographical or personal tensions are the main subjects of these films.

Golden Shorts: Best Films in Major Festivals – Award-winning films at Cannes, Berlinale, Locarno, Rotterdam, Sarajevo, Tampere and Clermont-Ferrand.

The INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION includes 5 strong curatorial themes this year:

Labor of Love / Labor or Love – What role does work play in people’s lives and in social communities? The films address this issue from different perspectives, such as human adaptability, the amount of sacrifices we are ready to make in order to find our role in society, to advance in our careers or simply to ensure financial comfort.

Longing and Belonging – What it means to belong, how people manifest their desire of belonging and how they are affected when they are denied their place in society because they are considered to be too different.

The Human Flow: Home in the Age of Displacement – Migration is a growing phenomenon in our world, but so are populism and nationalism. Following the stories of several immigrants, the films in this section analyze the problems faced by refugees and how media uses information in such a way that it leads to feeding a paranoid discourse.

Healing Voices: Remembrance and Reenactment – Films that present the ability of cinema to make us experience events that we didn’t attend. Here we find films such as Blue Boy (dir. Manuel Abramovich), where seven male escorts are listening in front of the camera their own stories, told by themselves; OMARSKA (dir. Varun Sasindran), which illustrates a virtual memorial, made up of archive footage, video recordings and declarations of the survivors of the Bosnian War; DEMONIC (dir. Piei Borg), based on the subject treated by Michelle Remembers, the novel by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith – the American crisis of sexual abuse in nurseries in the 80’s, is a compilation of formats and materials, combining found footage with CGI animation and reconstructed sequences.

Public Space and Urban Anxieties – Our view on urban space and the anxieties we face in our surrounding world.

BIEFF takes place between November 6-10, in Bucharest, at the Peasant Museum Cinema, Cervantes Institute, Union Cinema, POINT, Cinema PRO.

Tickets can be purchased on Eventbook.ro. For more details, visit the BIEFF website and Facebook page.

And, don’t forget about the FIF & BIEFF contest, which runs on Facebook!

Melissa Antonescu

Writer, photographer and videographer. For Films in Frame she writes news about the latest happenings in the film world and brings to the readers' attention the productions that can be seen at the cinema. When she's not writing articles, she's photographing people in a small studio or searching for new cake recipes.