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.

DANCEN

15:52, 2021, RO/DE
D: Corina Andrian

What do we say when we don’t talk? 

Dancen is the result of brief, intimate encounters between 5 dancers in preparation at the future Pina Bausch Centre for a series of street performances in Wuppertal, Germany. 

Robert Bresson once wrote: “Shooting. Agony of making sure not to let slip any part of what I merely glimpse, of what I perhaps do not yet see and shall only later be able to see.” 

The film looks at the fleeting impulses that live in between moments of the day. Their precise quality is being situated between quiet habits, that is the space inhabited by yearning, daydreams, surrealism. 

What did you dream in between two blinks, how did the sun shine that day, what occupied your waiting at the red light, what did you fear that day, how did the pressure feel when you touched something? 

How would a day look made of just the meaning in between the lines, the momentary glimpses of truth?

I HAD BEEN SLEEPWALKING WHEN I SAW ALL THOSE COLORS

10:32, 2021, RO
D: Bogdan Balla

Inspired by Derek Jarman's Section 28 installation, the film compares stories from a recent history of the Romanian queer community with current personal experiences, linking them to lyrical observations about a still hidden present, a distillation of the distance between the silent realities of queer love and the hysteria of its public representation.

YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED

14:58, 2021, RO
D: Marius Olteanu

“Most experiences are unsayable; they happen in a space that no word has ever entered”, writes Rilke. And still, there are words that connect people over time and shape their lives into having an inextricable link. The journey of three men, part dance into the unknown, part quest for meaning.

PIETÀ

9:55, 2022, DE
D: Oana Maria Moczulski
C: Oana Maria Moczulski

Pietà is a dance film about the position of women in Eastern European society. A woman as a mother must have an altruistic character, otherwise she may be judged as being selfish. Pietà proposes other alternatives, such as an equal or even reversed position, where the woman as a mother not only offers but also receives support and understanding.

IT'S A CLOWN'S LIFE

16:02, 2021, RO
D: Ioachim Stroe

The film tells the story of a man that goes through life being an actual clown. Not by choice, he is just born this way. We get to watch him going through a few crucial moments of his life like his birth, school, job, first love. We witness his downfall as life becomes harder and people become meaner.