Record 3,200 Submissions // Discourse Europe: Italy – Curated by Ronny Trocker // Focus Québec // Regional Focus: “As If It Were Yesterday – Films from the 1990s” // Start of Accreditations // Press Conference on 26 March 2024
From 16 to 21 April, Sylke Gottlebe and Anne Gaschütz together with their team are inviting film fans to immerse themselves in exciting short film stories from across the world at what will be the 36th edition of Filmfest Dresden. This year, the festival received a record number of 3,200 film submissions from 104 countries (2023: 2,800). Right now, the selection committees are choosing the entries to compete in the International, National and Central German Competitions. Together with the competition sections, a wide array of special programmes focusing this year on the theme of utopia are awaiting the audiences. A range of prizes amounting to €72,000 are due to be awarded at the festival. The complete programme of the 36th festival edition will be announced during the Press Conference on 26 March 2024 in the Schauburg Dresden festival cinema.
Thematic Focus “Dreaming Utopia: It’s going to be beautiful”
Our foretaste of the 36th festival edition includes some insights into this year’s special programmes, which are focusing on the theme of “Dreaming Utopia: It’s going to be beautiful” and exploring various forms and representations of utopia.
“On the one hand, short film especially is able to reflect critically on crisis situations, while at the same time it is capable of offering a collective projection screen for our hopes, wishes and utopias, and even articulating our desires for the future,” Festival Directors Sylke Gottlebe and Anne Gaschütz explain. “And for this very reason, we warmly invite all our festival visitors to revel in their dreams at this year’s events.”
One of the thematic programmes is, for instance, focusing on architectural utopias, imaginary architectures and architectural visions realised, while investigating the question of how humankind would like to live in the future.
A further programme dedicated to our thematic focus is exploring how to design and create a better and fairer future. The feature here is on the phenomenon of Afrofuturism in its striving for empowerment as it creates new narratives for the past, present and future, and avails of speculative genres like science fiction to discuss the Black experience in an innovative way and overcome racist situations. The programme is being curated by the director Kantarama Gahigiri, who is researching identity, migration, empowerment and forms of representation in her current projects.
Yet another programme is thematising utopia by taking postcapitalist mind games as its focus. We are delighted that the Austrian “pseudo-Marxist” (as they describe themselves) media collective “Total Refusal” is acting as the programme’s guest curator. The collective recently won the prize in the Best Short Film category at the 36th European Film Awards. In their works, the collective subjects the popular video games medium to a social analysis that is critical of capitalism.