The Marienbad Film Festival is bracing to close the summer with experimental films. While the 5th edition of the Czech festival of experimental films is joining the ranks of cultural events for the public that will actually take place, it has nonetheless been tailored to suit the current conditions. “The Marienbad Film Festival is an international festival of experimental nature. Let the experiment be another tool to deal with this state of emergency”, said the festival director Zuzana Stejskalová. The festival has been turned into an on-going showcase throughout the summer offering single screenings on Saturdays.

However, the 5th edition will culminate in the last weekend of August with the opening film How to Steal a Million (1966) by William Wyler. “A total number of 86 oeuvres from 16 countries were submitted for the 5th edition, from which we selected 19 Czech and 3 international projects,” revealed the festival director. Films experimental in narrative and form will be featured in the section Forum Marienbad. The section will open with an experimental western-horror cycle from Moravia directed by Petr Šprincl, Make Moravia Great Again I-III. Among other programmed films is Jiří Žák’s Debt, subtitled Epilogue of Long Friendship, with the friendship in question being the Czech-Syrian relation and the subject of Czechoslovak arms export; the short film The Palace of Seeing by Lea Petříková; Albert Hospodářský’s Nekyia, described as “a black-and-white parable peering into the human soul through the interplay of sounds and raw images;” the Denis Lavant-starring short mystery film Figurant by Jan Vejnar; the Polish short Presence by Anna Jankojć-Szafran; Ivan Marković and Wu Linfeng’s collective effort From Tomorrow on, I Will; and the German short by Ewelina Rosińska, Erde im Mund, described as a “16mm pilgrimage in 7 chapters,” among others.

The section Theatre Electrique will offer an additional dose of experiments. "The content of this section consists of five parts. The first part is Michal Kindernay's site-specific art, then we continue with immersive theatre by Jakub Čermák [queer play Mary Stuart. Anatomy (of Drama)], a reconstruction of Roman Štětina's performance [Souvenir 2015/2020], the next part is a collection of short films by Matěj Sláma and Jakub Vrbík, and the last part is a sci-fi documentary about sophisticated artificial intelligence by Viera Čákanyová [FREM [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Viera Čakányová
scheda film]]," says festival programmer Lubomír Konečný. This year’s edition of the Marienbad Film Festival will feature a new section of curated films from public film universities, FAMU and the Audiovisual Studio of Faculty of Multimedia Communications in Zlín.

The 5th edition of the Marienbad Film Festival will unfold 27-30 August. More info here.