Film O’Clock International Festival reached its 4th edition, which took place between February 28th and March 3rd in prestigious film universities, cinema halls and partner centres in Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt and South Africa.
For the international short film competition, the festival team chose 10 contenders from the 8 countries, some of which have already been nominated and awarded in international film festivals like the Berlinale, Sarajevo, Jihlava, and San Sebastian. These films are competing in the Film O’Clock International Festival for 2 awards: the audience award and the jury award. The Film O’Clock Festival director, Mirona Radu, told us about the selection process this year.
Mirona Radu: “Every year we tried to consolidate the festival, and we added another country each year. We started out with 5 countries, now we have 8. And of course our idea, our goal, is to add more time zones, more countries, because people are first and foremost interested in the concept. It is very interesting to know that the same movie is seen in very different and far apart countries at the same time. There have been simultaneous screenings in Europe before, but with the 2 films from Africa added this year, we have managed to go beyond the limits of the continent. This year’s selection has been very difficult, because we received a lot of high-quality entries, we watched over a hundred films. This is a good thing; it proves that we are becoming more visible, that people trust this concept and our selection. It is a joy, but it also made the process more difficult, as I was saying. There are 3 of us in the selection committee, and obviously there were heated discussions, perhaps because we come from very different backgrounds. Apart from myself, the committee includes the critic Andrew Mohsen from Egypt and Zhana Kalinova from Bulgaria. It’s not easy, finding a formula or putting together a selection that caters to all types of audiences, there is no question about that, especially because our festival addresses so many different people from so many different countries. But at the same time, the selection process is interesting because we all learn something. We cannot focus on a particular genre, so we include both fiction films and animations, and this year we had a documentary as well. Moreover, in terms of the selection, we don’t aim for a specific number of films. We would have wanted more entries this edition, but since most of them are rather long, 20, 25 even 30 minute, there were not a lot of titles we could include.”
The international competition included 3 Romanian films (“Suruaika”, directed by Vlad Ilicevici and Radu C. Pop, “When the MIGs fly”, directed by Philip Găicean, and “Hypatia”, by Andrei Răuțu), and one from the Republic of Moldova (“Bad News”, by Liviu Rotaru). Film O’Clock International Festival also comprises two conferences:
Mirona Radu: “Every year, the festival includes 2 conferences, addressing the industry people, so to say. Since the guests are usually industry professionals, the topics tend to be somewhat specialised, but the conferences as such are open to the general public as well. One of them focuses on heritage and artificial intelligence. The goal is to establish a connection between the past and the present, while also looking towards the future. AI, which is very much discussed these days, may also be an instrument in preserving our heritage—I mean archive films or even films in less used languages. For instance, in South Africa, which has 11 official languages at present, there is this company which is conducting a very interesting project with the help of AI. What they have set out to do is, by using AI, to preserve the films made there and the languages used in those films, with their specificity, because there is no telling how long we will be able to keep these things given the growing globalisation. The second conference centres around mental health, a very widely discussed topic and one which is quite important to tackle. We must admit that, as far as mental health is concerned, the film industry is or may be a toxic environment, unless we manage to observe certain limits. This is what we will be talking about in this second conference.”
Each short film in the Film O’Clock International Festival has given a unique perspective on the culture of its country or has attempted to take the audience to an imaginary world, unrelated to any country. Themes like family ties, societal changes, poignant realism and unbridled imagination are among the topics explored in this year’s selected shorts, says Zhana Kalinova, a film critic and a member of the Film O’Clock International Festival’s selection committee. (AMP)