Rio de Janeiro Festival Showcases Over 150 Short Films for Free

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The International Short Film Festival of Rio de Janeiro (Festival Curta Cinema) will screen 153 films from 35 countries, from Wednesday, October 30th to November 6th. Sessions are free and will take place at Estação Net Botafogo and Casa Firjan in Botafogo, and at Cinemaison downtown; the films will have a maximum duration of 30 minutes.

The selected productions are competing for national and international awards, which may qualify them for an Oscar nomination for best short film and for a Bafta, awarded by the British Film Academy. Films from 35 countries were shortlisted for the festival.

Interestingly, among the 3,400 entries received, there were more submissions from French filmmakers than from Brazilians. The director of the festival, Ailton Franco, said that this evidences the festival’s importance. “It shows the festival’s significance within the international circuit of festivals,” said Franco, emphasizing the increase in entries by Brazilians and other nationalities.

The increase in domestic entries led the festival to launch Panorama Brasil, separating domestic films from Latin American Panorama. In addition to the two, there is also the Panorama Carioca, and the special screenings of ‘Primeiros Quadros’ (First Panorama), by new directors: Em Trânsito (In Transit), with migrants and refugees; Interzona, fantastic horror cinema; and Children and Youth films.

According to Franco, there is a great diversity of subjects among the films, including identity and gender issues, preservation of the environment and indigenous peoples. In one of the short films, actor Lima Duarte plays an elderly man who waits for his family to visit him at his nursing home, but nobody shows up. In another, chief Faremá Kalapalo, from the Xingu Indigenous Park, tells the story of the birth of water and emphasizes the need for conservation.

“A short film production allows a freedom of approach to subjects and, therefore, is the ideal format to experiment with language and develop narrative languages,” he said.

This year’s festival broadened the parallel program dedicated to the training of filmmakers and will focus the production on social media, with workshops on storytelling for YouTube and Urban Animation for Instagram. “It is a way to contribute to a first glimpse at young professionals in the audiovisual area,” added Franco. He emphasized that the Internet is becoming an increasingly favorable area for the distribution of audiovisual content of shorter duration.

However, nothing replaces a festival, says the director of Curta Cinema, whose name can mean ‘Enjoy Cinema’. “First of all, the festival is a meeting place for people who will learn and want to know new insights into cinematic language. People who want to discuss, want to show projects. The festival is physically very important as a meeting place for fans and audiovisual directors.”

Source: Agência Brasil