SWF beyond borders
6 days of festival experiences, 65 films in 4 competitions, more than 150 films from all over the world in non-competition program. 9th edition of Short Waves Festival aims to promote diversity and openness to the world, because in the absence of these concepts short cinema could never exist. While designing this year’ s festival program, intended to focus on showing how illusory the geographic and stylistic borders really are, as well as expose the fluidity of division between the real and virtual world. The focus that we want to convey by means of“ beyond borders” motto is hardly geographic. We will be concentrating on artists originating from Germany, yet functioning within the European film industry and creating international co-productions. In the vein of the idea of diminishing borders between various art domains, we will be exploring the relationship between film and visual art, as we believe that the most interesting things in film occur in the space between the cinematic black box and white cube at the gallery.
Fear not – our repertoire will not be solely limited to video art or difficult at times experimental film. Short films have an immense cognitive potential and in the age of post-truth and superficiality we are trying to promote attentiveness. We believe that film may raise awareness of social issues and constitute a foundation for discussion on the surrounding world. Hence, the program includes many titles exposing the refugee crisis( such as:“ A Man Returned”,“ 9 days from my Window in Aleppo”,“ Il Silenzio”), as well as the situation of economic migrants in Europe(“ Departure”,“ The World we live in. Wandering Workers in Germany”). Thanks to excellent short documentaries, the viewers will also have the opportunity to watch a close-up on modern patriotism(“ Polonaise”,“ World War Cup”), and a difficult situation of women in remote parts of the world(“ Flower of a Thousand Colours”,“ Moriom”).
Finally, we will consider the most complicated of the borders – borders of communication between people and tangible social divisions. We believe that regardless of opinion or stance, it is good to talk(” Three Conversations on Life”) and fight for the freedom of speech. That is the reason why the symbol of this year’ s edition is a patchwork flag, for it is diverse and ambiguous just like the Short Waves Festival program.
Emilia Mazik program coordinator
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