STIFF awards ceremony this Sunday at Art-kino

Sunday brings us continuation of Distribute This! workshop, three programming slots, and the award ceremony of 6th Student International Film Festival. Second day of Distribute This! workshop with Morana Komljenović takes place at Mini Art-kino from 2 until 5PM. Students will develop strategies for distribution of their documentary films. At 6PM our main programme continues with the first programming slot of the day – Fading brings five movies that deal with death in an original way.

Gretel’s Trick (Milena Aboyan, Germany, 2019)

Inspired by poetry, animation film Second Floor (Dymphie Huijssen, animated, The Netherlands, 2018) without explicit narration talks about different associations and thoughts we have about death. Meditative and essayistic documentary A Life from Death (Tuuli Teelahti, documentary, Finland, 2017) brings reminiscences about death told by staff in a Finnish nursing home where every day is the last for someone. Warm animated autobiography Stray Cat Ah Q (Mulan Fu, animated, USA, 2019) is a story about a girl and a cat whose friendship overcomes time and distance. In a German comedy drama Gretel’s Trick (Milena Aboyan, fiction, Germany, 2019) retired Gretel Lotz stays with a family pretending to be their aunt Gretel, a distant cousin, to run away from her lonely, isolated life. Croatian documentary Probably Dead (Ivan Grgur, documentary, Croatia, 2019) presents people whose searching for diseases becomes a disease – hypochondria.

In contemporary world, the odds of growing up, living and dying in the same place are decreasing rapidly. Moving house, due to work, personal preference, love or some other reason, is part of our lives. Sometimes, it is hard to feel at ease in the new environment, and sometimes it is equally hard to remain in the old one. Meanwhile, time moves on. In this programming slot, from 7:30PM, five movies pose questions about a possible third option.

Documentary As far as our Feet Take Us (Renata Lučić, documentary, Croatia, 2018) shows turning points for director’s family, revealing a secret between her father who stayed in Croatia and her mother who found a new life in Germany causing their lives to change forever. In an animated journey to a new place Grow up to be a Little Tree (Noemi Ribić, animated, Croatia, 2019), a foreigner tries to plant a tree with other neighbours, and faces envy and disapproval. In Territories (Azedine Kasri, fiction, Algeria/France, 2018), a powerful drama about finding national identity, we watch an Algerian car mechanic who lived in Paris ever since he was born, but after an encounter with the police has to hide in an Algerian community where he gets in touch with his repressed feelings. My Label (Janne Janssens, animated, Belgium, 2018) begins with a label worn by a boy named Guus who is bullied daily in school because of it. After a girl decides to share her secret with him, things will start looking up. Croatian experimental documentary The Place I am Writing You Letters from (Nikolina Bogdanović, documentary, Croatia, 2018) is an intimate witness of emigration to Germany in 50s. Through a funny sequence of family photos and excerpts from real letters, the director shapes a relation between generations and a brave new world of West.

How to find the equilibrium between wanting to be independent and masters of our domain, and longing for safety? The last programming slot of this year’s festival, Equilibrium starts at 9PM with five unique movies about freedom and equilibrium. An eight-year-old boy will show incredible courage and persistence while fighting for a toy in film He Pulls his Truck (Proskurin Kirill, fiction, Russia, 2019). In the poetic animation Homesick (Noy Bar, Yoav Aluf, Hila Einy, animated, Israel, 2018) we witness a return to a family nest after an unexpected life crisis. A charming documentary Time Machine (Jan Bujnowski, documentary, Poland, 2018) brings a story of an unconventional and lonely street artist in his fifties whose parents come to visit. The animated film Prime Numbers (Anna Ottlik, animated, Hungary, 2018) depicts a morning routine of a man whose childhood memories penetrate to his present. In Dog Days of Summer (Nikola Stojanović, fiction, Serbia, 2019) a girl from the countryside moves to California, leaving behind two close friends in a fading working class city.

After the last screening, join us for the awards ceremony at 10:30PM