Bolzano Film Festival Bozen 2024 – The program

The program of the 37th edition to be held in Bolzano from 12 to 21 April 2024 has been presented. Lifetime achievement awards to directors Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi with screenings of six of their works

The 37th edition of the historic Bolzano Film Festival Bozen, which will be held in the capital of Trentino Alto-Adige from 12 to 21 April, will officially kick off on Friday 12 April with the screening of the 1919 silent film Blind Husbands, by Erich von Stroheim. Stroheim’s directorial debut film will be screened in a restored and revised version by the Österreichische Filmmuseum in Vienna and, for the first time in Italy, with live musical accompaniment thanks to the collaboration with the Südtirol Jazz Festival Alto Adige. The festival will close on Saturday 21 April Linda and the chicken, the animated film directed by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach and awarded Best Film at the Annecy Animation Festival. This year, the Lifetime Achievement Awards of the BFFB in collaboration with the Bolzano Tourist Board will be awarded to the directors Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi and to the production company Vivo film of Marta Donzelli and Gregorio Paonessa. A tribute will also be dedicated to Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi with the screening of six films. Yervant Gianikian will receive on behalf of both of them the award for the outstanding ensemble of their cinematographic work on Thursday 18 April. The lifetime achievement award given to Vivo film is motivated thus: “The dedication, passion, competence and sensitivity with which Marta Donzelli and Gregorio Paonessa develop stories and support the work of male and female directors” and will be delivered on Sunday 14 April.
In his second artistic direction of the festival, Vincenzo Bugno describes the objective of the BFFB: “It is precisely the multiple identity of this place, as well as the nearby border that attract me. The border as a line to cross, which transports us to distant places, radically different but paradoxically not entirely foreign. It is this curiosity, this feeling, certainly not only mine, which in some way underlies the artistic profile of this Festival: a multifaceted profile, certainly attentive to the local reality but profoundly fascinated by other places, by other artistic and cultural universes“. With a view to giving ample space to the idea that borders are not limits but starting points, the BFFB37 dedicates a focus to Brazilian Indigenous Cinema. Minorities, languages, conflicts are contents that also often recur in the BFFB37 Competition, open to documentary forms and fiction/fictions, and in the RealeNonReale section which proposes a further program of documentaries, all Italian, German, Austrian and Swiss productions and co-productions and among these, a very large part of the titles proposed in the two sections will be Italian premieres. BFFB Special is the section in which short films linked to other films in the program such as the animation works of Simone Massi or Maria Lassnig find space. A selection of short films from the 2024 Berlinale and some films made by students of the ZeLIG film school will also be shown here. There are also some feature films visible to the Bolzano public after presentations at other festivals, such as the Swiss one Deer Girl, by Francesco Jost, Persona non grataby Antonin Svoboda e Pepperby Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias, revelation of this year’s Berlinale, awarded the Silver Bear for best director.

HERE is the official program