The 25^th Jubilee Edition of the Split Film Festival and “Mare” arrive to Bačvice in September

Split, August 20, 2020 – Despite the coronavirus pandemic, the 25^th jubilee edition of the oldest-running international film festival in Croatia – the Split Film Festival / International Festival of New Film – will take place this September. In accordance with the current coronavirus protection guidelines, movie lovers will be able to enjoy the programme in the open-air cinema.

The Festival will take place from 10^th to 17^th September, and the main section of the programme will be shown in the charming venue of Bačvice open-air cinema. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, numerous famous film-making friends of the Festival will not be able to visit Split, but the audience will have the opportunity to enjoy their company online. Among them is the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, the winner of this year’s special award for an outstanding contribution to the art of motion picture.

As in previous years, international feature and short films competition forms the core of the festival, with a special emphasis on the Berlinale award-winning Taiwanese drama RIZI / Days (directed by Tsai Ming-liang) and Land of my Father (directed by Matthew J Koshmrl), a documentary which brings to the screen the unresolved trauma of the Japanese occupation of Korea and its repercussions for the lives of the local farmers.

The accompanying programme features a remarkable documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache (directed by Pamela B. Green) which shines a light on the intriguing story of the forgotten first female director and producer of more than a thousand films, whose accomplishments had been, until recently, completely erased from the predominantly masculine historical narrative.

Commemorating the recent death of Bekim Sejranović, the Festival’s programme will also feature the movie From Tokyo to the Morava River (directed by Moku Teraoka), whose protagonist was played by Bekim himself.

Viathe movie screen, the audience will be able to spend some time with two beloved actresses from Split. Marija Škaričić comesto Bačvice as the protagonist of the Swiss-Croatian film Mare (directed by Andrea Štaka), in which she embodies the complexity of a middle-aged Dalmatian woman, while in the Slovenian-Italian feature film Stories from the Chestnut Woods (directed by Gregor Božič) Ivana Roščić leads us into a dreamlike story about the forgotten community which used to live on the border between Yugoslavia and Italy.

The Festival’s online programme offers the opportunity to participate in masterclasses for both movie enthusiasts and movie professionals regardless of where they are. The masterclasses will be given, among others, by Robert Arnold, American director of short experimental films and G.H. Hovagimyan, a new media artist. The participants will also be able to attend lectures by the British video artist George Barber and American director Pamela B. Green.

For the past 25 years, the Split Film Festival has been focusing on works which deviate from the predominant canons of film and video production. Apart from selecting the recent international and local film production, the Festival is also renowned for a series of retrospectives, workshops, lectures and presentations given by leading experts. Particularly memorable, and unique on a global scale, are the Béla Tarr and Lars von Trier retrospectives, as well as the retrospectives featuring the Brazilian Cinema Novo and the unknown works of Orson Welles, and the first, and so far the only, retrospective of the father of video art, Nam June Paik.

Split Film Festival is the first Croatian film festival which has, from its very beginning, been promoting the new media, offering its audience the first drive-in cinema ever to be organized in the country, a film-making workshop by Béla Tarr and the lecture by the father of the avant-garde cinema, Peter Kubelka.