The 17th Batumi International Arthouse Film Festival (BIAFF) will take place from 18-25 September as a full-blown edition after two smaller pandemic-hit events, but general manager Zviad Eliziani says the team is in dire financial straits after all public funding has been pulled.

“All government sponsors – the Ministry of Culture of Georgia, the Georgian National Film Center, the Ministry of Culture of Adjara and Batumi City Hall – refused to finance BIAFF without any clear or compelling arguments as to why,” he tells Cineuropa. “In a way, this is in line with the current repressive cultural policy in Georgia.”

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Back in March, the former director of the Georgian National Film Center, Gaga Chkeidze, was ousted from his position by Minister of Culture and Deputy Prime Minister Tea Tsulukiani. This was widely seen as part of a move to impose censorship on the cultural field in the country and focus the funding on nationally themed films and other types of content. Until 2022, the Ministry was regularly funding BIAFF, even if the sums were small compared to those coming from the Regional Ministry and the City Hall.

However, these bodies also refused to finance BIAFF this year, using the argument that their budgets had run out, even though the festival submitted its application way before the deadline. “Because of this difficult situation, we contacted the producers and distributors of the invited films, explained our financial problems, and they all generously agreed to waive the screening fee, which constituted a huge amount of support for us,” says Eliziani.

Several embassies helped with expenses for the guests coming from their country, and BIAFF launched the #letsmakebiafftogether fundraising campaign here and here in order to collect enough money for the necessary logistics and venue rental. More information can be found here.

“We are somehow managing with difficulties on a smaller scale, but BIAFF is not just a film festival – it is a free and independent platform for audiences to access new films and meet filmmakers. It also plays an important role in promoting Batumi as a festival city,” Eliziani points out.

In addition to the ten-strong International Competition, which includes titles such as Manijet Heckmat’s 19, Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike [+leggi anche:
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trailer
intervista: Maryna Er Gorbach
scheda film], Tayfun Pirselimoglu’s Kerr, Michael Koch’s A Piece of Sky [+leggi anche:
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trailer
intervista: Michael Koch
scheda film], Francesco Costabile’s Una Femmina - The Code of Silence [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Francesco Costabile
scheda film], Bahman Gobhadi’s Four Walls, Romed Wyder’s A Fleeting Encounter, Hilal Baydarov’s Sermon to the Fish [+leggi anche:
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trailer
scheda film], Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Herd Immunity [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] and Soso Bliadze’s A Room of My Own [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze e Tak…
scheda film], the BIAFF programme will feature a Focus on Ukraine and a Georgian Panorama (with four features, and five short and mid-length films), as well as a selection from the Cine-Doc Tbilisi Festival, another casualty of the repressive national cultural policy.