The festival will roll out the red carpet on Friday, November 11, during a gala ceremony at Kino Nostalgia that will also be open to the general public. The event will be attended by Rade Šerbedžija, a famous Yugoslav actor of Croatian origin who has made it as far as collaborating with the legendary Stanley Kubrick. As part of the grand opening, Mr. Šerbedžija will first be decorated with BIFF’s Award for Artistic Excellence in World Cinema and then he will present his directorial debut, The Liberation of Skopje (Osloboduvanje na Skopje, 2016), which he co-directed with his son, Danilo.
In an opulent cinema feast that will start Friday afternoon and last for seven days, the Bratislava film festival will dish out a great number of remarkable films such as Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016). In one of his latest pictures, the iconic director and documentarist chronicles the virtual world from its origins to the visions of near and distant future, exploring the digital landscape with the same curiosity and imagination he has previously trained on remotest earthly destinations ranging from the Amazon to the Australian outback. Herzog leads the viewer through a series of provocative conversations with leading scientists, revealing the ways in which the online world has transformed virtually everything in the real world as well as the very heart of how we conduct our personal relationships.
The Competition of Documentary Films will include a recently awarded film, The Dazzling Light of Sunset (2016), which took the main prize of the section dedicated to central and eastern European films from a documentary festival in Jihlava. In her picturesque debut, directress Salomé Jashi focused on the fun house of colourful characters from a small-town Georgian television, documenting everyday life of the local community.
In cooperation with the Red Nose (Clowndoctors) civic association, BIFF once again proudly presents a charity projection that will take place on November 16 at Kino Mladosť. A stop-motion animation family feature by Swiss-French director Claude Barras that has been nominated for the LUX Film Prize, My Life as a Courgette (Ma vie de Courgette, 2016), tells a story of an orphaned boy who seeks love, a new family and his place in the sun. By buying tickets to this special screening, festival-goers will help raise extra funds for red-nosed clowndoctors and encourage them on their mission to cheer up hospitalised children and senior citizens.
