Ya hear me?!
This year we’re searching for ourselves amid increasingly deafening noise. In fear, instability, polarization, hatred, us against them, us against ourselves, in the dissolution of known realities and the shaping of new ones.
Coming of age. Sometimes, we’re less and less people and more and more like stone. Made to resist, and resist, and resist.
Resistance and stubbornness only matter if we’re not alone.
This edition we’re keeping and revisiting what was dearest to us over the festival’s 18 years , but we’re also testing out new structures, offering our platform to voices often unheard and creating a context for closing ranks and supporting one another.
Becoming is, more than anything, a form of return - looking towards what was and restructuring towards what we choose we want to be(come).
We see film as the foundation for our endeavours, documentary as an amplifier and a catalyst for discovery, connection and, maybe, change.
More than ever, "resistance through culture" feels less as a metaphor and more as a safety net for some of us. Starting here, we’re exploring different forms of resistance: through activism, community, isolation, through public and private actions, which you can discover in the documentaries and events we’re proposing.
We are an island that persists in order to keep its memory, bridging past and present through dialogue.
You can meet us at the Media Hall of the Romanian Peasant Museum for discussions on the festival’s history and events hosted by our friends and in three cinemas: Peasant Museum Cinema, Elvire Popesco Cinema and Union Cinema.
This year, we have three main sections ("Dialogues", "Reverberations", "Exist to Resist"), a focus/retrospective (Marc Isaacs), a section where we’re exploring a new format, based on debate ("Extended Dialogues") and a series of events in the categories introduced last year: Community, Education, Industry.
The most extensive of these, Youth Days, now in its second edition, expands with a community lunch and an extended volunteer fair, featuring almost 20 organisations open to the public for discovery.
We want to have a more grounded edition, where we run around less and stay together more, where we have space, time and the context to meet and explore new ways to support one another.
In an increasingly unpredictable, chaotic and frightening environment, this is the type of relevance we hope to hold in your lives.
Andreea Lăcătuș
The project does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the project's content or any use to which the project outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
