A Word from our Selectors:
Competition Feature Film
Competition Short Film
Competition Documentary Film
In Focus
New Currents & New Currents Short
Panorama
Panorama Documentaries
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A Word from our Selectors: New Currents & New Currents Short
Reaching beyond conventional storytelling the programmers of New Currents are in search of directors who are curious and daring in experimenting with narration, footage and visual approach, blurring the borderlines of the established film genre canons.
Features in the section combine thrilling narratives, such as an impressive, semi-autobiographical film by Xavier Dolan, director and performer, whose debut feature analyses a love-hate relationship between a mother and a son, in a hysterical relationship study also offered – on a very humorous note – by the Belgian animation duo Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar in a delirious stop-motion feature A TOWN CALLED PANIC.
A stunning visual approach and emotional absence of Antonio Campos’s AFTERSCHOOL captures adolescence in an atmosphere of paranoia and unease. Despite their young age, all the directors presented here have already developed a strong personalised cinematic language. Inspired by Thoreau's “Walden”, two Swedish filmmakers, Henrik Hellström and Fredrik Wenzel, devised a poetic and unconventional fable of a boy growing up in BURROWING, their first feature. MR. GOVERNOR, a portrait of a veteran Swedish politician is a prominent social inquiry by the documentary filmmaker Måns Månsson.
Combining different genres and styles, but also offering space to a film form unappreciated due to its length, one programme presents super-8 musical, IT’S NICK’S BIRTHDAY by Graeme Cole and a sharp and authentic dissection of an Austrian society, ELEPHANT SKIN by Ulrike Putzer and Severin Fiala – excellent examples of medium-length films – and, bridging the gap from art to cinema, Jesper Just’s impressive short film, with atmospheric narratives consisting of ambiguous storylines.
With short films presented in New Currents, unseen aesthetic qualities, innovation, application of technology and diversity of themes are unburdened by commercial pressure. Shorts are alive and kicking, more powerfully than ever before.
Philippe Bober and Vanja Kaluđerčić, programmers
