“It is a movie whose rhythm is provided by changes in colour and the fluidity of sound, which maintains a constant sensation of surrealist transposition into an unknown, yet existing present.A living, lyrical, poetic and profound”, is how the jury described the production. In its 10th year, the NexT International Film Festival, which was held between April 7 and 11 at two cinemas in Bucharest, brought together the latest and most innovative short films from across the world, selected from among 2,000 productions.
Critic Irina Trocan joined Massimiliano Nardulli and Oana Ghera in the jury this year, and she told us what that involved: “It is a matter of practice, of training, I am in my sixth year, so I have my secret tricks. Of course we dont watch all 2,000 films, we divide them among ourselves. Of the 700 films each of us watches, we set some aside until the selection goes down from 2,000 to 200, which we discuss and settle on the final selection. We wanted this edition of the competition to be the most radical, at least in terms of narrative cinema, to select the most ambitious films. A few years ago we decided to include sections that are more appealing to the public, such as Next Comedy and Next is Love. This year we came up with a new sections called Out of Space, a short sci-fi film section and we also had a section of video essays, which we liked a lot, which is closer to film criticism than to conventional cinema. They include montages of sequences from famous movies by the likes of Kurosawa, Fellini and Tarkovski, remixed and commented by a critic, which is why it is an intersection between making film and film criticism. We also have two sections that try to bring to the silver screen things we dont often see in mainstream cinema, I am talking about Next is Feminist and LGBT. The former entailed films about the condition and issues of women, while the LGBT section is dedicated to sexual minorities.”
The film screenings were accompanied by seminars led by famous people in cinema, as well as competitions and special events.
Critic Ileana Barsan was one of the special guests at this anniversary edition of the NexT International Film Festival: “Before being the guest of the festival, I was in the audience at the first edition. In terms of my role this year, I took part in two events. One of them is called The Pitch, which includes 10 short films that remained in the race for the 5,000 euro prize. In the jury we also had Sebastien de Lame, a Shorts TV marketing & sales manager specialiding in short movies, and visual artist Stefan Constantinescu. Our common mission was to pick a single project out of the ten. We had two rounds, in the first round all the people selected had one minute to present their project in English, and a brief montage of their previous movies. We in the jury decided which five projects remain in the race, then we had round two, in which the five projects were presented in more detail, and we asked the participants questions.”
Ileana Barsan, trainer in various areas of cinema production and the founder of filmikon workshops of cinema education and education through cinema, told us about one other event at the festival:“This is a round table organised alongside the launch of a cinema education program called European Education for Youth, funded with European money and gathering together several European partners. The NexT Society, with the programme it has been running so far, Education a lImage, and the Macondo Association, which now has on its agenda the Film for High School Students programme, are partners in a wider European project, the European Education for Youth. The main topic of this round table organised by NexT is cinema education.”
Set up in 2006 in memory of two talented cinema professionals, director Cristian Nemescu and sound designer and composer Andrei Toncu, the NexT International Film Festival has had the same mission as always: that of showcasing original and daring voices who are likely to become the next stars in contemporary cinema.
