Student International Film Festival, STIFF, is about to begin!
From 19th to 22nd October in Art Kino in Rijeka we will be able to take a peek into the future of the film. The Student International Film Festival - STIFF will soon begin and over the next four days it will provide us with a cross-section view of student films of 21 countries, from Brazil to Indonesia.
From 19th to 22nd October in Art Kino in Rijeka we will be able to take a peek into the future of the film. The Student International Film Festival – STIFF will soon begin and over the next four days it will provide us with a cross-section view of student films of 21 countries, from Brazil to Indonesia.
STIFF’s film program consists of 38 mostly short films of all genres (feature, documentary, animated, experimental, hybrid) divided into nine programme blocks. The festival will also contain a discursive programme, and the educational programme for students has already been taking place for some time.
This was announced at the press conference by the festival’s artistic directors Maša Drndić and Sanja Marjanović, project coordinator Zoran Baljak and moderators of the discursive programme Greta Grakalić-Rački and Petra Bezjak.
Sanja Marjanović and Maša Drndić explained the themes of the films by which they were divided into programme blocks. The first of them, Misplaced, which will open the festival on Thursday 19th October at 6 p.m., is a collection of four movies, all of which have a protagonist who make small, intimate escapes and rebel against oppressive everyday life. Documentary About my sister (Barbora Sliepková) describes the world through the eyes of a young woman who has voluntarily decided to isolate herself and the animated film Jiyan (Jan Fabi and Milena Aboyan) is a reminder of the rigid frameworks certain cultural-religious circles have when it comes to sexuality. Feature film Pria (Yudho Aditya) has a similar theme, while Born wrong (Kaisa El Ramly, feature film) through an episode of two sisters driving in a taxi depicts a “classical” family drama.
Block Things we don’t talk about (Thursday, 8 p.m.) discusses somewhat controversial themes. Luiza (Caio Baú, documentary) is a confession about prejudice, relationships between parents and children, and love affairs, Elusive (Ely Chevillot, Feature Film) problematizes child’s sexuality from the perspective of a mother, Pussy (Renata Gasiorowska, animated) is a humorous story about discovering one’s own body, while Sabine’s Nursery (Manuel Rees, documentary) reveals a new line of trendy madness – collecting dolls resembling newborn babies.
On Friday at 6 p.m. in the block called Others we gain insight into the forgotten (which is sometimes even frightening). There is a documentary portrait of the Hungarian public space –Blaha Luiza Square(Antonin Blanc), documentary Lost city (Sara Radusinović) which describes war memories in a form of a diary, Different Bayern(Matthias Koßmehl), fiction on the fusion of the East and West on the soccer field, The world we live in (Hanna Fischer, Sofiia Melnyk, Nina Prange), an animated documentary portrait of migrant workers from Eastern Europe living in Western Europe, Poilus (Guillaume Auberval, Léa Dozoul, Simon Gomez, Timothé Hek, Hugo Lagrange, Antoine Laroye, David Lashcari) an animated war story featuring rabbits.
At 8 p.m. the block Odyssey gathers movies that “are looking for a better life”. Documentary Champions (Anastasija Bräuniger) vividly depicts the dreams of a group of small Kurdish football players from a refugee camp in Northern Iraq, animated film We are the Immigrants (Catalina Matamoros) deals with the topic of illegal border crossing, documentary Bread is Gone(Soran Qurbani) is an existentialist miniature filmed in Sevdinan refugee camp in Mosul, and documentary Where Euphrates and Sava Flow Together(Andreas Muggli) in a lyrical fashion follows a refugee route along the Balkan a few days before the closing of the Greek-Macedonian border. That same block includes animated film Water Marks (Meshy Koplevitch) and the feature film Mayday Relay (Florian Tscharf).
On Saturday the programme will start at 5:30 p.m. with the programme block Interference. It contains films whose protagonists are faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles: for example, short-animated film The Indigestion (Mathilde Remy), a sketch of a family lunch to which we can all relate at some point, a feature film Who Gives (Lenka Jovanovic), a sketch of the life of four young people during a drunken night, or a feature film Lunch Time (Alireza Ghasemi) about a 16-year-old girl who has to identify a mother’s body.
At 7 p.m. in the block Embrace we will watch four films, among which a documentary Education (Emi Buchwald) about a hard and incomprehensible homework, while at 8:30 p.m. in the block Chapters we will see fragments of everyday life, and in this block, among others, we will find the only Croatian representative in the program, the documentary Women Women WomenNikice Zdunić, and coming of age feature film Beer & Calippo (Paul Ploberger) about a young pregnant Jojo who has to make important life choices.
On the last day of the festival, when we announce the winners, the program will be opened at 5:30 with the block Here! which is made up of two atypical documentaries on Gypsies: Gypsy (Carmen Baltzar) about how Finns see the Gypsy community and Valentina (Maximilian Feldmann) about a family from a poor neighborhood in Romania.
The last block will take place on Sunday, beginning at 8 p.m. after announcing the winners. Its name is Whispers and it is made of stories about friendship, moments of intimacy and addiction, including documentaries NO 1 (Aline Magrez) and Daniel (Anastazja Dabrowska) as well as animated film Bond (Judit Wunder) about a lonely woman who creates an unusual relationship with a creature resembling a cat.
After the programme blocks -Things we don’t talk about on Thursday, Odyssey on Friday and Here! on Sunday, discussions will be held on issues of family and social relations, migration, sexuality and minority issues, chosen with regard to this year’s main festival theme Social ISsUeS. With this play on words carrying the meaning of Social Issues, we want to emphasize that social issues are not just the problems of a certain group of people but the problem of the society as a whole. The talks will be moderated by Greta Grakalić-Rački, an associate professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Rijeka and Petra Bezjak, a graduate student of Cultural Studies, who at the press conference pointed out that these topics have been chosen because they are always current, applicable to the student population and they open a series of other questions.
The discussions are a part of the programme called STIFF film circle which is a finishing touch to the effort of the festival to make it truly student-oriented. That is why the students participating in Field Education, have already been included in the preparatory actions. The design of this year’s edition is signed by Sandra Kvaranta, a student whose work was chosen among several other works by students of the Academy of Applied Arts. Some students have been working diligently on preparing texts for the festival catalogue and translating the programme as well as some other materials, while several students are attending a workshop about making film subtitles, about assisting the Public Relations Office and the office for festival’s guests. Also, the film criticism workshop will soon end. It was held this week by a film critic Dejan Durić, who is a professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka.
A separate jury was formed for each genre, and they will chose a winner in every one of them. The jury for the animation is made up of a Croatian animator Petra Zlonoga, a Hungarian animator Anna Ottlik and a student at the University of Rijeka Katarina Zrinka Šarić. The jury for the documentary film is a film critic Hrvoje Krstičević, a Syrian director Huda Takriti and a student in Rijeka Marta Ban. The jury for the feature film is the screenwriter and selector of the student short film programme at the Sarajevo Film Festival Asja Krsmanović, a young Belgrade director Nikola Zdravković and a student in Rijeka Filip Kušter. The audience will have the opportunity to vote for the best film of their choice, so one of the directors will also be awarded this important prize.
All movie programms are free!
The Student International Film Festival – STIFF is organized by the Filmaktiv and Student Cultural Center (SKC) of the University of Rijeka, with the collaboration of Art-Kino. Supported by the Croatian Audiovisual Center, The Croatian Film Directors’ Guild, the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, the University of Rijeka and the Foundation Kultura Nova.
