Freiburger Filmforum 2025
Festival of Transcultural Cinema

The cur­rent rev­o­lu­tion­ary polit­i­cal, eco­log­i­cal, and alarm­ing­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments around the world often seem over­whelm­ing: the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the con­flict in Sudan, the rise of right-wing forces. Which nar­ra­tives, which films are able to counter these dystopias?

The Film­fo­rum pro­gram will show­case pre­cise­ly these other voices: The film­mak­ers who are with those flee­ing Russia because they refuse to be har­nessed into Putin’s war machine; who dance with the young on the streets of Khar­toum and cel­e­brate the Sudanese spring, how­ev­er brief; who have accom­pa­nied the strug­gle of Indige­nous people for over a decade, fight­ing against the con­struc­tion of a pipeline through their sov­er­eign ter­ri­to­ry in north­ern Canada; or who stand in the way of the machines in Finnish forests, resist­ing the destruc­tion of trees des­tined to become self-assem­blable furniture.

What per­spec­tive do people have if they - and the envi­ron­ment - are treat­ed in this way? This year, it is mostly young and pre­dom­i­nant­ly female film­mak­ers who have addressed these ques­tions - and whose answers we will present in the main pro­gram of the fes­ti­val week. These are films marked by a pro­found sense of jus­tice and solidarity.

With a spe­cial pro­gram, the fes­ti­val pays trib­ute to the work of Ate­liers Varan, Paris, which has sup­port­ed the first cin­e­mat­ic steps of young tal­ents in many hotspots and on var­i­ous con­ti­nents for 30 years. In each case, short doc­u­ments of the time have been cre­at­ed - most recent­ly in Uzbek­istan, where we will con­nect live with Junc­tion Tashkent. Togeth­er with the cinema audi­ence there, we will watch and dis­cuss three out­stand­ing works from last year’s work­shop at the Tashkent Film School.

In the Junc­tion format, we once again join forces with Tashkent to present a selec­tion of stu­dent works. The stu­dents’ plat­form is cel­e­brat­ing its 10th anniver­sary and received a strik­ing 508 sub­mis­sions from 77 coun­tries for this spe­cial edi­tion, from which a pro­gram fea­tur­ing the crit­i­cal think­ing and uncon­ven­tion­al per­spec­tives of young cre­atives has once again been curated.
In the Resound­ing Resis­tance sec­tion, films were select­ed that focus on life in con­flict sit­u­a­tions and the resilience that grows from them. The aim is to create spaces of sol­i­dar­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ty for people at risk.

So, look for­ward to an inten­sive week with us, full of dis­cus­sions and encoun­ters. We would like to thank the City of Freiburg, the Medien- und Filmge­sellschaft Baden-Würt­tem­berg, the Baden-Würt­tem­berg Stiftung, the Sparkasse Freiburg, and, final­ly, the Kom­mu­nales Kino and our spon­sors for once again making this possible.

The fes­ti­val team