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ASTRA 2018

The 25th Astra Film Festival ready to kick off

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- Romania’s biggest documentary film festival is offering more than 400 screenings and film-related events over the course of seven days

The 25th Astra Film Festival ready to kick off

The 25th edition of the Astra Film Festival (15-21 October) is ready to kick off in Sibiu, one of Romania’s quaintest cities and most important cultural centres. With 128 movies in the selection, the country’s oldest and biggest documentary film event boasts 400 screenings across nine venues, plus a host of conferences, debates and other cinema-related meet-ups for audiences of various ages.

Almost 60 films will be competing in the festival’s five official competitions (see the news). Five juries consisting of 13 jurors, among them Romanian directors Cristi Puiu and Alexandru Solomon, IDFA founder and former director Ally Derks, executive director of the International Documentary Association Simon Kilmurry, Bulgarian professor Dina Iordanova, founding director of the Open City Documentary Festival in London Michael Stewart, and former head of the Directing Faculty at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin Martin Martschewski, will hand out awards during a gala held on 20 October.

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“The 2018 selection is relevant to the world we live in, where more and more daily events in the political and social landscape affect the very essence of our human condition, and fewer manage to restore our faith in humanity. At a time when life really beats film, the selected productions bring novelty to the genre through both the variety and complexity of the topics they discuss, and the creativity of their stylistic approach,” stated Dumitru Budrala, the festival's founder and director, in a press release. His latest documentary, Transalpina - The Road of Kings, about one of Romania’s oldest and most picturesque roads, is set to open the festival today.

The selection is rounded off by The Future Is Now sidebar, consisting of full-dome and VR productions (see the news), and also by Astra Film Junior, a festival-within-the-festival event targeted at younger audiences: some 30 short and feature-length documentaries, various debates and other events are sure to attract and enlighten a new generation of documentary lovers and filmmakers. Another star attraction at this edition is a retrospective sidebar entitled Road to Europe, which will bring some of Eastern Europe’s most pressing issues from over the last few years back to the audience’s attention (see the news).

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