The Astra Film Festival announces its line-up
- The festival in Sibiu will screen 100 documentaries split into thematic groups, from 17-23 October
The 23rd Astra Film Festival in the Romanian city of Sibiu will take place from 17-23 October, and will screen 100 documentaries in 15 thematic competitive and non-competitive sections.
The festival has revealed that a record number of 2,000 films were submitted this year. The movies in the AFF 2016 programme are grouped pursuant to the topics they explore and are reunited in themed programmes, such as Inside Radical Islam, No Place Like Dis-Place, Citizens of the Online World, Communist Faiths, and Aromanians.
Powerful authorial voices are reflected in sections like Self-Family-Society, Doc-vlog, Circumscribed Spaces, and Stories from Urbania. Breathtaking stories and incredible characters appear in the films included in programmes like Encounters, Refurbished Past, and Reality Under Cover. Forty of the films in the themed programmes are also part of the four competitive sections of the festival: OutStanDox, Romania, Central & Eastern Europe, and Student.
The main OutStanDox competition includes titles such as Dead Slow Ahead [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mauro Herce
film profile] and Depth Two [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], while Central & Eastern Europe will feature Train to Adulthood [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Abdul and Hamza.
A special programme dubbed Great Master’s Latest is dedicated to the most recent films made by the superstars of non-fiction cinema, and it includes The Pearl Button [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Patricio Guzmán, Fire at Sea [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gianfranco Rosi
film profile] by Gianfranco Rosi, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World by Werner Herzog and The Thoughts That Once We Had by Thom Andersen.
“The film selection at this year’s edition is remarkable both in terms of the diversity of topics, as the festival has numerous themed programmes, and in terms of the integration of new immersive and new-media documentary formats. For 23 years, the Astra Film Festival has been like a passport that viewers can use to cross borders and explore other worlds,” said Dumitru Budrala, the founding director of the gathering.
The official selection of the 2016 Astra Film Festival is available here.
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