STIFF begins in two weeks: Student International Film Festival first time online
7th edition of Student International Film Festival (STIFF) will take place from 26th to 29th November in Rijeka’s Art-kino, and for the first time ever, it is going to be held online. Due to the current situation regarding the pandemic, we have decided to enable safe attendance of our festival to everyone who is staying at home in order to preserve their own and health of their loved ones.
In Art-kino cinema in Rijeka, as well as on our web page, viewers from all over the world will be able to watch 40 films from 20 countries divided into eleven program blocks. The films will be competing for best fiction, animated, and documentary film, as well as the audience choice award.
During the four days of the festival, the program will take us on a journey through various topics; from wandering the real and imaginary spaces of the enchanting program Wanderers that will lure us on a journey of no return, over the Edges of safety of the monotonous and predictable lives we so often nestle in, to the completely twisted and unique pursuits and wishes of the peculiar protagonists of the program Tripping Out. We will see films from Brazil, Australia, Estonia, and Norway, as well as our neighbouring countries, while Israel will lead in numbers with its ever-brilliant animations.
We will have the opportunity to see a Croatian-Belgian fiction film The Stamp directed by Lovro Mrđen, whose story of an immigrant facing the cold bureaucracy of a foreign country is the Student Oscars finalist. We will once again find pleasure in watching a film by an award-winning young Serbian director Nikola Stojanović. His film Šerbet is bound to win over our hearts, as it won The Heart of Sarajevo award for the best student film at Sarajevo Film Festival. I Still Don’t Know is a film by Bela Bračko-Milešević, a young lady from Varaždin, living in Rijeka. This film is a product of Blank’s school of documentary film that took place during lockdown, and it will take us on a melancholic daydream about home and growing up.
Side program dedicated to sound
To further explore the role of sound in film, as well as its influence on contemporary society, STIFF 2020 created a concurrent program named Sound Occupations that will use innovative audio-visual content in order to alter the role of sound and equate it with, or even make it dominant to image.
Guided by the idea that by exploring the sounds of a city we can learn a lot about social, political, and economic forces running it, the program will occupy Rijeka’s gallery, virtual, radio, and public spaces by sound.
Over the course of four days, (November 26 – 29) citizens of Rijeka will be able to experience the art of sound on six city locations through four festival programs: Everyday Soundtrack (audio installations and performances in public space), SoundBox (multimedia exhibition in a pop-up gallery at Korzo 26c), ChatterBox (radio and music shows on community radio Radio Roža), and Sound Occupations (multimedia exhibition at Youth Culture Centre Palach). Gathering foreign and local artists, program Sound Occupations is an homage to sound as a fundamental generator of everyday life and as an artistic impulse.
Student International Film Festival (STIFF) was first organized in 2014 by Filmaktiv Association and Student Cultural Centre in Rijeka (SKC) with the goal of presenting the best of the recent production of student and debutant film.
Cover image: For Your Sake, dir Ronja Hemm, documentary, 38 min, Germany, 2019
