DANCE ON FILM FOR THE FOURTH AGE — SHORT FILMS SCREENINGS FOR THE ELDERLY

SEPT 8, 9 🕣 FROM 11:00 📍AT THE RESIDENTIAL CENTER AMALIA AND CHIEF RABBI DR. MOSES ROSEN

The Age4 Community Art Centre (2009-present) is a socio-artistic project created within the Moses Rosen Residential Centre for the Elderly. Following the experience of working together for 18 months, the residents of the home together with a team of artists and performers launched, on May 30, 2011, the "Age4 Community Art Centre". Together they created several dance and community theatre performances, based on the personal stories of the home residents, while advocating against ageism.

The Age4 Community Arts Centre is a space dedicated to promoting community art with institutionalised people through socio-performative practices.

BIDFF VR ’22

SEPT 8 - 11 📍AT /SAC @ MALMAISON

The BIDFF VR '22 selection questions the safe world we live in and presents us with the fragile reality in unstable areas of the planet. The exhibition takes visitors on an introspective journey through the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, then time-transitions through the transformations of a city in Indonesia, and promises an incursion through microscopic parallel realities and the conflicting emotions of unrealized love stories.

The interactive experiences of this edition transform the viewer into an active participant and help them discover the spectrum of human nature in the 21st century. You will use body, voice, and sense of touch to understand what it means to rediscover a forgotten language, manipulate mundane objects, or a fantasy world floating in the clouds. 

JOYLAND

DRAMA, 126', 2022, PAKISTAN

THURSDAY, SEPT 8 🕣 FROM 18:30 📍 AT CINÉMA ELVIRE POPESCO

As the happily patriarchal Rana family craves for the birth of a baby boy, the youngest of the Rana men secretly joins an erotic dance theatre and finds himself falling for a fiercely ambitious trans starlet. Their impossible love story slowly illuminates the entire Rana family's desire for a sexual rebellion.

The film won the Queer Palm and the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2022 Cannes Films Festival.

THRESHOLD ZONES – INTERNAtional Competition I

THURSDAY, SEPT 8 🕣 FROM 21:00 📍 AT GRĂDINA CU FILME — CINEMA & MORE

The first international film section of the 8th edition of BIDFF focuses on the idea of border – geopolitical, emotional, aesthetic, and transpersonal. Placing themselves on the fine line between "familiar" and "foreign," directors and choreographers from seven countries explore fluid, transformative identities. Threshold Zones is an affective cinematic journey, guided by bodies of astonishing diversity, running out of sync. This section contains animations, poetic documentaries, and performative experiments that can open a portal to a new way of glimpsing at the future.

Line-up: Tehura, Isn’t It a Beautiful World, SHE, Passage, and La Nostra Terra.

SCREENDANCE LAB WITH OMARI 'MOTION' CARTER

SEPT 9 — 11 🕣 FROM 10:00 TO 14:00 📍AT THE NATIONAL CENTER OF DANCE BUCHAREST

One of the most prolific dance filmmakers in Canada, with 30 years of experience in the field, Marlene Millar will attend BIDFF to teach an intensive workshop and contribute to the professional development of the local creative industry.

Within this workshop, participants will gain an insight into the production process of The Motion Dance Collective and explore exercises that look to develop a practice that bridges the gap between moving body and moving image. From mediation to idea, we will look at the choreography in front of the camera, the choreography of the camera, and the choreography developed in the edit, as participants aim to develop short digital-dance experiments throughout the three days. Together we will gain practical experience with tools that inject an essence of hybridity into our own on-going practices.

Challenging the Genres, Producing a Dance Film — Case Study with Simona Deaconescu and Anda Ionescu

FRIDAY, SEPT 9 🕣 FROM 15:00 📍 AT THE NATIONAL CENTER OF DANCE BUCHAREST

The dance film was born from the need to explore the body through cinematography. But from the first dance films to the present day, such production has remained in a poorly financed niche area.

The script of a dance film is a hybrid product, combining specific elements of a cinematographic production with features related to structuring a performative work, often called scores. Usually, the dialogue occurs between movements, atmospheres, and dynamics, opening the way to explore worlds where the concrete is replaced by the abstract, the strange, or the sensory. From the constant rewriting of a script, as a result of a creative laboratory always in transformation, to the creation of a storyboard, to finding the most compatible collaborators, a dance film production is atypical for both performing arts and the film industry. 

Given this reality, making a dance film is a long, challenging process for both the artists and the production teams developing it.

Guided Tour through the cinematic OBOR with Adrian Ionescu

FRIDAY, SEPT 9 🕣 FROM 17:00 + SATURDAY, SEPT 10, AND SUNDAY, SEPT 11 🕣 FROM 12:00📍 IN DIFFERENT LOCATIONS OF THE OBOR DISTRICT

We propose a guided tour of the Obor district, an old neighbourhood with a rich cultural history where. We will discuss, among other things, Veranda Mall, where a 12-screen cinema operated by Cinemax was inaugurated in 2019, Europa Cinema and the former Aurora Cinema, as well as the evolution of these locations in relation to the space as a whole.

We also propose a dialogue about fragments of landscape captured in Romanian films from various periods, which we will encounter during the tour. Stuff and Dough (Cristi Puiu, 2001), Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu, 2016), Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, 2021), are some of the films we will talk about, each of them taking note, at some level, of the changes that have occurred in society and people's inability to adapt.

DANGER ZONES – INTERNAtIONAL COmpetition II

FRIDAY, SEPT 9 🕣 FROM 18:30 📍 AT CINÉMA ELVIRE POPESCO

A boy passionate about dance from Chad doesn't want to stop smiling not even when his village is destroyed by war. A girl in Lebanon becomes a woman overnight because of poverty and personal sacrifice. A dancer from Poland loses connection with her body after a traumatic abuse. For young people in Lithuania and Chile, the sense of belonging gives rise to consequential identity crises. In the second competitive section of BIDFF, five film productions launch a complex dialogue about the contexts that put our lives at risk. Danger Zones is about those physical or emotional scars that cannot heal in a generation.

Line-up: Amani, Quiver, Trumpets in the Sky, Techno, Mama, and TARJETA ROJA.

MOONAGE DAYDREAM (in Dolby Atmos)

DOCUMENTARY, 140', 2022, GERMANY/USA

FRIDAY, SEPT 9 🕣 FROM 19:30 📍 AT CINEMAX VERANDA — ULTRA-X HALL

From Oscar-nominated filmmaker Brett Morgen, director of Cobain: Montage of Heck, and featuring never-before-seen concert footage, Moonage Daydream is an immersive cinematic experience; an audio-visual space odyssey that not only illuminates the enigmatic legacy of David Bowie but also serves as a guide to living a fulfilling and meaningful life in the 21st Century.

Moonage Daydream is not a documentary. It is a genre-defying cinematic experience based on one of the most iconic and global rock stars of all time, destined to be one of the defining cultural moments of the year.

The film has the full support of Bowie's estate and features many of his greatest tracks, as well as previously unseen concert footage.

HYPOTHETICAL ZONES – ROMANIAN Competition

FRIDAY, SEPT 9 🕣 FROM 21:00 📍 AT FABRICA GRIVIȚA

The Romanian Short Film Competition includes five cinematographic productions created by directors and choreographers with diverse experiences and interests. The artists presented by the festival look at the body as a reactionary force. Thus, the body becomes the mirror of hidden, silent realities that struggle to surface and make themselves heard. How can the body restore a necessary balance in a society strewn with hypothetical and (un)safe zones? – is one of the questions on which the 8th edition of BIDFF invites us to reflect.

Line-up: Dancen, I Had Been Sleepwalking When I Saw All Those Colors, You Who Never Arrived, Pietà, and It’s a Clown’s Life.

ECTOPIC ZONES – INTERNAtional Competition III

SATURDAY, SEPT 10 🕣 FROM 18:30 📍 AT PEASANT MUSEUM CINEMA

BIDFF's third competitive section finds the body in challenging places and positions anchored in a counterintuitive movement to the space it occupies. The protagonists of these film productions bump into social taboos in the Netherlands, occupy abandoned theaters in Panama, or refuse to be forced to leave their homes in the UK. In Ectopic Zones, the world is seen as a juxtaposition of form, light, color, and movement, constantly generating captivating dissociations of meaning.

Line-up: The Wall, Fist, Variedades, Hanging On, ag:au, and Abyss.

HIP ZONES – INTERNAtIONAL Competition IV

SATURDAY, SEPT 10 🕣 FROM 20:30 📍 AT CINÉMA ELVIRE POPESCO

The last screening of short films invites audiences into a sensory universe that melts bodily boundaries. Hip Zones intertwines reality with fiction and dissolves the body in the lava of its fears, desires, and thoughts. The five short films presented at Cinema Elvire Popesco explore the body's memory by reimagining new forms of movement, synesthetic experiences, and necessary recontextualizations. Together they form a sponge-body, an organism powerfully touched by time, where the past experiments become the hip zones of today.

Line-up: Shells, Neon Phantom, Sauna, Nicholas Brothers: Stormy Weather, and SOAP.

DANCE OF URGENCY — LECTURE BOGOMIR DORINGER

SUNDAY, SEPT 11 🕣 FROM 15:00 📍 AT THE NATIONAL CENTER OF DANCE BUCHAREST

I will be speaking about how the project I Dance Alone observes dance floors from a bird's eye view or what used to be called the divine perspective. Crowds are analyzed as microscopic samples. 

Zooming in to dancing gestures and anonymous dancing bodies has provided extensive knowledge and insight into club culture and its transformation in times of socio-political changes. As if dancing crowds are like clouds announcing changing weather conditions or sensing may be times of shifts and urgencies that are about to come. 

In my work, I travel between looking at dancing crowds, a form of political protest, to tracing empowering powers that dance holds for everyone who dares to move. The curation of symposiums and exhibitions became an active methodology in my work. It awarded me with the term "dance of urgency", a dance that rises in times of personal and collective crises, and such a dance aims to empower individuals and groups. My presentation will be supported by various video archived material and visual examples. The most important part of dance and fascination with it is not knowing but moving within or towards it.

NEPTUNE FROST

DRAMA, SF, MUSIC, 105', 2021, FRANCE/RWANDA/USA

SUNDAY, SEPT 11 🕣 FROM 18:30 📍 AT PEASANT MUSEUM CINEMA

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.

ROOKIES

DOCUMENTARY, 114', 2022, FRANCE

SUNDAY, SEPT 11 🕣 FROM 20:00 📍 AT CINÉMA ELVIRE POPESCO

In the heart of Paris, a prestigious high school takes an audacious bet: integrate students from working-class districts and make them break the circle of school failure through dance and hip hop. Rookies tells their story.

Rookies premiered earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was screened in the Generation section.

BIDFF 2022 Awards Gala

SUNDAY, SEPT 11 🕣 FROM 21:00 📍 AT GRĂDINA CU FILME — CINEMA & MORE

At the end of the four days of festival, BIDFF invites you to one last event for its eighth edition — the BIDFF 2022 Awards Gala, followed by the screening of the winning short films from both the International and National Competitions. The event will be presented by the festival's artistic director Simona Deaconescu, and will feature as specials guests some of the members of this year's jury. Audiences will thus have the opportunity to (re)watch some of the best film productions presented in the festival, under the starry sky, at Grădina cu Filme — Cinema & More.