Films without Sweeteners. Experience without Borders.

Borders are last year’s nightmare. The collective fantasy is poisoned with images of European frontiers collapsing, of hundreds of thousands of refugees passing through barbed-wire fences, alongside a mounting fear of an economical crises that, pretty much like terrorism, acknowledges no borders.
The core of our 2016 program, through its three main sections, is closely linked to all the above-mentioned anguishes. While mass-media depict these issues in black and white, we provide context and present their nuances and shades. And this is how we will glimpse beyond the borders, to see that the old continent mourns and shivers, but preserves its unique charm and the straightforwardness of the values that kept it alive. Or that migration has always existed, and in the Middle East people still have fun, or love each other, even if around them it raves and storms.
Yet, nothing is more ghastly than what the human being does to his own kind. In other four sections we gathered films talking about injustice of judicial systems and about violence against women, about the absurdity of the “working market” and about the cruelty of institutions for people with mental disabilities. Bitter as they might seem, the selected films account for a necessary antidote to all those evils.
Documentary, as a film genre, is resting on edges, and lays there, where fiction borders journalism, where the experimental borders sound civic-mindedness. This being in-between borders, specific to non-fiction film, is perhaps the reason why documentary is so well-equipped to talk about frontiers.
The genre itself essentially migrated towards ever more hybrid territories. The power of documentary genre resides in its mobility hard to constrain by definitions, in the fact that it swiftly absorbs the most cutting edge online tendencies, as it ventured in the landscapes of video games and already took off in the dizzyingly unknown space of virtual reality. Through our festival’s events, we also tried to paint a comprehensive portrait of this emerging adventures beyond any sort of established or expected borders.
The fears and uncertainties in which we dwell are to be reassured by the magic of film, by the affection documentary makers show for the people whose lives they record, by the compassion they trigger in every single one of us. And not only films are at stake here: there are experiences and encounters that we envisaged around this selection. And thanks to all of the above, at least for one week, we will gather our strengths to overcome fears, even when it seems there is nothing left to lean on.

Dare to cross the border, and come on our side!

Alexandru Solomon
Mădălina Roşca