Outlook on FFDD23: Focus on Anti-Racism
For the 35th edition of Filmfest Dresden, we warmly invite all film fans to Dresden from 18 to 23 April 2023 to experience and enjoy our wide-ranging programme of exciting short films from across the world on the silver screens in our festival cinemas and other venues. In addition to the competitions, the special programmes are currently being prepared and provide a foretaste of what to expect.
The focus this year is on antiracism, following our prior thematic spotlights on "Activism" (2021) and "Gender Equality and Justice" (2022), thus bringing our trilogy on the theme of diversity to a conclusion.
In the programme on the homeland theme, for instance, we are exploring what homeland means in the new German Federal States, where so much fear of the foreign and the alien currently prevails, and how the audiences can become actively involved in the process of living together and integrating. This programme is being curated together with the Czech filmmaker Diana Cam Van Ngyuen, who also explores and confronts her Vietnamese origins in her work. Her film LOVE, DAD received the International Competition Audience Award at last year’s Filmfest Dresden.
Working together with various guest curators has long been a successful concept here at Filmfest Dresden, which we are continuing this year. One of the curators invited to Dresden this time around is Maryam Tafakory, who was born in Iran and lives in Great Britain. For years now, her filmic collages, often based on found footage, have explicitly resisted the marginalisation, discrimination and traditional gender roles of women in Iranian society – positions that also play a major part currently in the protest movements in her homeland. The programme curated by her is focusing on this subject, as well as on other thematic aspects of the festival.
The special programmes are also providing space on an artistic level for new narratives and aesthetics. The works by the Mexican collective "Los ingrávidos" ("The Weightless Ones") combine theoretical reflections with activist cinematic practice so as to split open traditional audio-visual grammar.