FeKK BAL: Competition programme

The initial intention of the FeKK YU programme was to juxtapose local filmmakers and their short films with those of their colleagues who come from a similar production environment of the former common state. Films by some of the filmmakers were screened several times, thus drawing attention to the continuity of certain names or authorial poetics that are worth paying attention to. After six years of intensive short film reintegration of the former Yugoslavia, we have reached a stage in our development where we want to take our film knowledge, screening and international cooperation to the next level. This year marks the beginning of a new three-year funding cycle, which is why the timing fits right in. The international competition programme is expanding over the entire Balkans: so please welcome filmmakers from Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Albania. With them, FeKK YU has become FeKK BAL – the Balkan Films Competition, or in more refined terms, the films from the Balkan Peninsula.

We have thus gained four new countries, as well as four very specific and different cinemas, which made it clear from the first selection onwards that they bring along a strong fiction programme, possibly based on the recent successes of their feature films and the well-known directors, who have been at the forefront of the so-called new wave of national cinemas, especially in Romania and Greece.

While the films of the associated Balkans are characterised by a fairly homogeneous genre definition (there are also two animated films in addition to fiction films), the former Yugoslavia, on the other hand, is characterised by both genre fragmentation and fusion, which is particularly evident in the case of docu-fiction, as well as in the fusion of fiction or documentary film with experimental forms.

Either way, it is true for the entire FeKK BAL that the selected films build and inhabit worlds with complexity that is revealed in the details. They explore internal horizons from all possible perspectives (sometimes even within a single film) or, simply put, draw the viewer into the world of the film precisely because they leave room for their own complementarity, intervention, associations, etc. This entails the sort of participation that makes watching films both a pleasure and a challenge.