The 20th anniversary of IFF Prague – Febiofest will be celebrated from March 14th to 22nd in Prague. Afterwards, the Regional Echoes will take place, this year in extended form. The festival will bring famous guests to the capital, starting with Geraldine Chaplin. The audience can also look forward to the return of the filmmakers who received the Kristian award for Contribution to World Cinema in the last 20 year as a special section is reserved for them, and also to a large retrospective of Finnish cinema, and also a new competition section dedicated to mid-length films.
February 27 – program published at www.febiofest.cz
March 6 – ticket sale starts at Cinestar Anděl (and from midnight also online)
March 11 – the main press conference
March 14th – 22nd – 20th IFF Febiofest Prague
March 25th – April 12th – Regional Echoes in 12 cities:
České Budějovice – March 25th – 27th ; Liberec – March 26th – 28th
Děčín – March 27th – 29th Jihlava – March 28th – 30th ; Plzeň – March 29th – 31st ; Hradec Králové – April 2nd – 4th ; Pardubice – April 3rd – 5th ;
Karlovy Vary – April 4th – 6th; Opava – April 5th – 7th; Brno – April 8th – 10th; Olomouc – April 9th – 11th ; Zlín – April 10th – 12th
On April 4th, the closing ceremony of the festival's 20th anniversary will take place in Zlín.
Febiofest will again take place in Cinestar Anděl, which has been the main venue of the festival for 9 years. Films will be presented on all twelve screens of the multiplex. Moreover, Malostranská Beseda will serve as the festival's venue this year as well: Febiofest will use it for concerts, screenings and social events. As usual, the popular Febiofest Music Festival will take place in the garage of Cinestar Anděl. Regional Echoes of the 20th Febiofest will appear in 12 cities, including all the Czech regions in the festival (the exception is the Central Bohemian Region, which will be provided for by the approximately 180 films directly in Prague).
The ticket price for all cities remains the same. Each ticket will cost 89 CZK.
The 33 members of the audience jury will award the Grand Prix in the New Europe competition once again!
The 33-member jury that will choose the Grand Prix is open to everyone from 15 to 100 years old, to people of all education, social background, professions, and interests. The applications must be submitted by February 27th. Out of the submitted applications, the festival will choose the 33 lucky ones who will see all 15 films in the competition program. The jury will be completed by an honorary chairman (the position in previous years was held by cameraman Miroslav Ondricek, architect Jan Kaplicky, artist David Cerny, conductor Libor Pesek, and former First Lady Dagmar Havlova)
You can apply now at http://www.febiofest.cz/en/jury
20 years of Febiofest
Where else would you celebrate a film festival than on a screen? The personalities who have received the Kristián award at Febiofest for their lifelong contribution to cinematography return to the program with their new works:
Claudia Cardinale starring in Fernand Trueby's The Artist and the Model, Sandrine Bonnaire with her directing feature debut called Maddened by His Absence, Volker Schlöndorff's war drama, Calm at Sea, Roman Polanski in a documentary about his life and career, and Mike Leigh's short film A Running Jump which was one of the contributions of the British filmmakers to the Olympic Games in London.
This list is completed by the directors whose Tributes were presented at Febiofest in the past 19 years: Jan Troell, Jos Stelling, Peter Naess, Olivier Assayas, the directing duo of Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth, the French duo, Benoit Delépine and Gustave Kervern, and also the Febiofest Grand Prix winner of 2009, the Bosnian filmmaker, Aida Begić.
The first announced star of the festival is Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Chaplin (b.1944), an American actress, originally a ballet dancer, daughter of Charles Chaplin and also granddaughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill on her mother's side, started with film as a child in her father's memorable films such as Limelight and A King in New York. Afterwards, she became a key actress for directors such as David Lean (Doctor Zhivago), Robert Altman (Nashville, A Wedding) Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her), Alain Resnais (Life Is a Bed of Roses) and Carlos Saura (Peppermint Frappe, Honeycomb, Anna and the Wolves, Elisa, My Love, etc.). Carlos Saura was also her husband. Among her other famous roles is the role of the French queen in the Three Musketeers. In 1992 she played her own grandmother in the documentary called Chaplin about her father, Charles. She still shoots films frequently, and the Febiofest audience will see her in new films And If We All Lived Together, Americano and The Impossible.
Febiofest will be publishing the names of other guests over the next few weeks.
Czech films
On February 1st, Mira Fornay's new film, My Dog Killer, received the main award in the competition at the 42nd IFF Rotterdam – the Tiger Award. The dramatic story is set in the contemporary Moravian-Slovakian border region and it focuses on the controversial topic of xenophobia and racism, using the highly modern language of contemporary auteur cinema. The Czech audience can see the film premier at Febiofest, in the New Europe competition section. My Dog Killer will make its commercial premiere on April 11th thanks to CinemArt.
My Dog Killer will compete with the feature debut of eighteen-year-old (!) Matej Chlupacek, Bez doteku (Touchless). The film tells the story of teenage Jolana, who is the object of her stepfather's sexual desire. She cannot solve her family problems, she is losing the ability to communicate with her friends, and she falls deeper into the enclosed world of her imagination.
The rest of the New Europe section program will be published on February 27th.
Cinderella – a new mid-length films competition!
On the occasion of Febiofest's 20th anniversary, we have organized a second competition section! Apart from New Europe with its first and second feature films of European filmmakers, the audience will have the chance to follow a film competition of the mid-length films.
“The second competition is dedicated to the films that are not long enough to be considered feature films, but not short enough to get at least to the countless festivals of short films. These films of between 30 and 65 minutes duration are like abandoned cinderellas that nobody wants. This is why we've decided to dedicate a whole section of the anniversary Febiofest to them,” says the program director, Hana Cielova.
The competition excels in its genre variety: thrilling Mexican drama, sarcastically grotesque absurdity from Sweden, Polish satirical black comedy, neorealist description of a country funeral in Moldavia, a truly poetic picture from Turkey, an Israeli road movie, an Oscar nominated American production shot in Kabul, an evidence of the impacts of the Afghan war on the lives of German soldiers, or typically generational existential testimonies from France and Finland.
Renowned directors are not missing in our selection: the Cannes Golden Camera award winner, Vimukthi Jayasundara; or a prominent director of independent American cinema, Hal Hartley. The cinema of our Slovak neighbours is represented by the world premier of The Exhibition with its peculiar humour, and Czech cinema will be represented by an ambitious auteur study Enkel by the renowned artist, Mark Ther.
The international jury will give three equal prizes with a financial reward.
Finland – films, that break the hardest Scandinavian ice
In previous years, Febiofest focused on various Northern cinemas: Swedish in 2011, Danish in 2009, and previously Norwegian, Estonian etc. 2013’s 20th anniversary edition of Febiofest will introduce a large section of contemporary Finnish cinema. You will have the chance to see melancholic comedies, road movies, dramas full of passions that are not so cold, as well as a western, or, more precisely, a “northern” from the times where the Finnish knife ruled the country instead of the law, and non-conventional absurdities such as sci-fi oddity Iron Sky. One of the famous directors is Mika Kaurismäki – in his Road North, we will find out what a proper song is capable of, and reveals why smoking weed while listening to heavy metal is not such a good idea.
Crazy Lapland Oddyssey (dir. Dome Karukoski) takes you amongst drunk Russians, flaying a caribou, and into a swimming pool full of female rugby players, but it is full of glimpses of the typical Scandinavian melancholy, and the relationship drama slowly drips from the omnipresent icicles. The winner of last year's Febiofest, Zaida Bergroth, is returning to the program with The Last Cowboy Standing.
The section's pillar is the tribute to Aku Louhimies, a director and uncompromising observer of the darker sides of life, which exist even in such an idyllic and corruption-free country, and the portrait of Tero Kaukomaa, a producer who succeeded in producing international hits for the worldwide market, and who is thus something like Nokia of the Finnish cinema.
For the lovers of screening marathons who also want to learn something about late Finnish history, destructiveness of alcoholism, and about the roots of prohibition, we present the tetralogy called Eight Deadly Shots by Mikko Niskanen, which is considered to be one of the essential films of Finnish cinema by Aki Kaurismäki. A restored version of this neorealist masterpiece will be screened at Febiofest only once, and it will be probably the only chance to see it for a long time.
Balkan Beats
This year, Febiofest honours the wish of all viewers who repeatedly asked to increase the number of Balkan films. “We offer seven pictures from the Balkan countries where humour mingles with stories of intense passion,” says program director Stefan Uhrik. The absurdity of the recent ethnic conflict is depicted in Halima's Path, whereas Sergio Castellitto from Italy returns to the encircled Sarajevo in his film,Twice Born, starring the excellent Penelope Cruz. Parada is a Serbian film full of black Balkan humour, the hit of audiences at last year's Berlinale. The changes typical for post-communist countries are presented with humour in the Romanian film, Of Snails and Men. The poetic Meteora, on the other hand, takes the viewer to the world of an orthodox Greek monastery. The Third Halftime is a Macedonian film with Czech co-production which takes us all the way back to World War II.
