It‘s 30 years ago that students at the Kommunales Kino mustered all their commitment and vigor to found the freiburger film forum. The festival then soon went professional and evolved into an international platform for film makers working on intercultural topics. The student audience has always made its mark upon the atmosphere at this film forum, and so we seek to install the students’ film forum as stage for young film makers‘ contributions.
Our program seizes on the festivals forum concept by intensively covering and discussing the extensive variety of methods and angles of talented young film makers in reaction to cultural and sociopolitical issues. The selection opens a wide range of oeuvres in the field of visual anthropology, graduation projects at renowned film academies, and inde-pendent film projects. The more varied movie makers‘ approach, the more varied their choice of topics.
UP-ROOTED shows in flickering Super 8mm pictures how young people deal with their own hybrid identity in a globalized world, while HOME IN MIND has a close look at the identity problem in the virtual world of Second Life. There are numerous aspects to the issue of which transformations and problems young people are subjected to in times of political upheavals: be it in the fictional film SADAKAT, in which a young woman must balance her family‘s safety against her solidarity with the Gezi protests, or in the docu-mentary ABDO, in which we follow the video diary of the young protagonist on his way through Cairo stricken by revolution and terror.
The thoughts and notions behind the camera relate also to the world of objects. What do things do if there isn‘t anyone around? The increasing focus of visual anthropology on the ethnography of things requires innovative and experimental forms of depiction. The human perspective is increasingly scrutinized; the camera is directed at networks and technologies, animals and objects, which require their own particular cinematographic vocabulary. SOLARIS, for example, manages entirely without any dialogue, but yet the forsaken objects at the shopping mall in downtown Tallinn have their very own story to tell. HINOKI FARM with great immersive effect also transfers us to the world of minute movements and the simple things. With an open eye for the surroundings and the mo-ment, the up-and-coming filmmakers create quiescent yet enthusing documents of all that is possible within sensory ethnography.
In portraits of impressive young personalities, such as the Romanian guttersnipe IULIAN or the young seamstress BINTOU from Burkina Faso, the filmmakers display remarkable sensibility by disclosing their life stories in a personal way. In particular this year‘s opening film OUT OF FOCUS offers an inside perspective on life and dreams of young inmates at Mexico‘s most dreaded youth detention center.
Innovative approaches to documentary work also play an important role in the student’s film forum‘s accompanying program. The webbased interactive documentation REFUGEE REPUBLIC familiarizes us with everyday life at the Syrian refugee camp Domiz in northern Iraq. Taking various routes, we can virtually roam this place which comes to life by way of a collage of photographs, videos, drawings and sounds. Another dimension of expe-rience beyond the confines of the cinema screen is opened by Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses. In the virtual domain, we adopt the perspective of a young Chilean officer who witnesses an execution during one of the infamous “death caravans” under Pinochet‘s regime in 1973.
ASSENT is an autobiographic project, which makes excellent and very impressive use of this revolutionary technology.
We particularly look forward to the master class with David MacDougall as part of the student‘s film forum. His seminar titled AN EVOLVING FILM PRACTICE will present examples from his films to illustrate major shifts in his work and to discuss these with participants.
We very cordially invite you to attend and we look forward to a first exciting student’s film forum,
Eva & Hannes
and the student‘s film forum team