AKTUELLES

It’s season launch for the 15th Provinziale

Preparing a film festival is a rather inconspicuous process: curators looking through submissions on screens, organisers contacting artists, communication running in the background. This year, our team had to work their way through 849 films from 71 countries. Besides Germany, most of the submissions came from Russia, followed by Spain, France, Iran and the United States. Provinziale makes the world visit the province.

Now the quiet days of preparation are coming to an end. The contenders have been chosen. From 6 to 13 October, 39 films from 19 different countries comprising Iran, Malaysia, Australia and China will be shown in four competitions – Documentary (8 entries), Short Documentary (8 entries), Short Feature Film (14 entries) and Animated Film (9 entries).

The festival opens on 6 October with a screening of The Village of Swimming Cows, a documentary by Katarzyna Trzaska (Poland/UK/Germany) which, by the way, will be the film’s premiere in Germany. It tells a story of three young neo-hippies from Berlin who travel to a Polish village to get closer to their roots. But worlds collide when they meet their Polish hosts. The film goes right into the diversity of human perspectives on life and invites us in a friendly and cheerful way to make productive use of it.
The winner of the Long Documentary competition (45 mins and longer) will be awarded the Main Festival Prize, worth €4,000 and donated by the Brandenburg State Ministry of Economic Affairs. However, in terms of meaning and artistic density, none of the other competitions lag behind. In the Short Documentary category, for instance, we were able to establish a focus on the protagonists’ regional ties in all selected films.

The competitions will be supplemented with a wide range of special programmes. For the Province Classic event on 13 October, we have chosen Fred Zinneman’s marvellous High Noon, a film that shows how people act without any social networks – province taken to the extreme, so to speak. On the same day, we will be showing Weit – Die Geschichte von einem Weg um die Welt (Far – How we travelled the world). The film, which was also a box-office success, shows how a young couple from Germany have to confide time and again in a variety of very different people they meet on their long journey.

This year’s Gateway to the Province has been designed by Matthias Friedrich Mücke, who, as a film cartoonist, was already part of last year’s festival. The vernissage will be on 29 September at 10.30 am, one week before the festival starts, during the Guten Morgen Eberswalde event at Paul Wunderlich Haus.

Finally, the festival club will be offering concerts, readings and a nightly bar to our visitors again. On Wednesday, 10 October at 10 pm, we will see the second issue of the Farmers’ Film Night featuring Antje Schiffer – surely an enhancement to the Provinziale’s thematic range.
The closing event with reception, award ceremony, a screening of the winning films and live music will take place on Saturday, 13 October. We are looking forward to the festival week, to seeing the films, meeting the artists and receiving our visitors.