Breaking new ground in Bucharest cinemas

The first event ever to have showcased avant-garde cinema and visual art in Romania is back, courageously breaking more cinematic taboos. So what can viewers expect at this year’s Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival?

By Oana Vasiliu

Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu and Radu Jude are some of the outstanding local voices in the area of realistic narrative fiction. Against this flourishing creative background comes the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), aiming to broaden perceptions and open up a whole new artistic territory both for general and specialized audiences.

BIEFF features the International Experimental Short Film Competition, consisting of some of the most intriguing and innovative visual experiments over recent years, titles awarded and screened at prestigious festivals, museums and galleries all over the world, such as Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Centre Pompidou and so on.

Following on from its past success, BIEFF will again dedicate its 2012 Opening and Closing Ceremony to the most recent works by major names in contemporary cinema. This year, organizers have invited the winner of the Golden Lion Venice, the controversial Korean director Kim Ki-Duk, to present Pieta (in picture), a film that depicts the mysterious relationship between a brutal man and a middle-aged woman who claims to be his mother, mixing Christian symbolism and highly sexual content.

For this third run, the International Competition Jury includes distinguished film professionals such as Christophe Leparc (managing director, Quinzaine des Realisateurs, Cannes Film Festival), Jonathan Pouthier (cinema curator, Centre Pompidou Paris), Francois Bonenfant (head of studies, Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporaines France), Anna Abrahams (director of the Experimental Film Department of the Eye Film Institute Netherlands) and Brigitta Burger-Utzer (director of Sixpackfilm Austria). The honorary president of the festival is a key voice of avant-garde contemporary cinema Peter Greenaway.