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FEBIOFEST BRATISLAVA 2020

Bratislava’s Febiofest gets a makeover for its 27th edition

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- The imminent edition of International Film Festival Febiofest Bratislava will unspool under new leadership, showcasing the latest domestic films

Bratislava’s Febiofest gets a makeover for its 27th edition
Servants by Ivan Ostrochovský

The second-longest-running film festival in Slovakia, International Film Festival Febiofest Bratislava, is bracing for its 27th edition, which kicks off on 11 March. The upcoming edition will unspool under new leadership, with Ľubica Orechovská (a producer from PubRes) acting as managing director and Ondrej Starinský (commissioning editor of the Documentary and Educational Department at Radio and Television Slovakia) in the role of artistic director, while former director Přemysl Martinek is serving as a supervisor for the festival’s programme. The Slovak Audiovisual Fund has supported the gathering with a three-year grant, and Febiofest is assuming its position as a city festival, especially now that another similarly orientated event with a long tradition in the capital city, International Film Festival Bratislava, is not going ahead. “We want to prepare a film festival in Bratislava that will be equally attractive for cinephiles and audiences who would like to see a different type of cinema than that which is usually screened in theatres,” said Orechovská.

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The gathering will introduce the latest Slovakian films as domestic premieres, following their bows at various international festivals. Straight from the Berlinale will come Ivan Ostrochovský’s black-and-white drama about the Catholic Church’s complicity with the communist regime in the 1980s, Servants [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ivan Ostrochovský
film profile
]
, which will be the official opening film. The Slovakia – A Country of Film section will host Viera Čakányová’s sci-fi documentary essay FREM [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Viera Čakányová
film profile
]
, which was recently screened at Berlin as well; Old-Timers [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Martin Dušek, Ondřej Provaz…
film profile
]
, the best Czech film of 2019, according to domestic critics (see the news); Barbora Chalupová and Vít Klusák’s disturbing documentary-cum-psychosocial experiment Caught in the Net [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
(see the news); and Mira Fornay’s absurdist drama about domestic abuse, Cook F**k Kill [+see also:
trailer
interview: Mira Fornay
film profile
]
.

The main competition, In the Heart of Europe, will see short films from the Visegrad region and Austria competing for the top trophy, and this year they are also joined by titles from Ukraine. The competition offers a medley of fiction, documentary, animated and experimental shorts, among them the highly celebrated, Oscar-nominated Daughter; the Slovakian film Sh_t Happens; Ukraine’s Deep Love; Playing by emerging talent Lun Sevnik, about two teenagers who are preparing to commit suicide and live-stream it; the one-shot anatomy of a terror attack Banality by Hungarian director Balázs Simonyi; and Siegfried A Fruhauf’s experimental flick Thorax. Furthermore, the festival programming structure includes the Film+ and Masters sections, for films by seasoned auteurs; daring and provocative movies in Limitless, including Michal Hogenauer’s A Certain Kind of Silence [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michal Hogenauer
film profile
]
, Bohdan Karásek’s critically lauded Karel, Me and You and Artemio Benki’s Solo [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Artemio Benki
film profile
]
; plus a strand for midnight screenings, called Planet Dark Presents, which will show Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bertrand Bonello
film profile
]
, among others.

Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning director Costa Gavras will be the main guest of honour, and he will also meet domestic and international students at the event, as Febiofest has been running in parallel with the Visegrad Film Forum educational and networking platform since last year (see the news). For the fifth time, Febiofest will host Works in Progress, an industry sidebar introducing domestic film projects in the making to international professionals.

The 27th edition of International Film Festival Febiofest Bratislava runs from 11-17 March. Please click here to see the full line-up.

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