Created in 1993, the Astra Film Festival this year celebrates 30 years of showing documentary films from Romania, Eastern Europe and more broadly from around the world. The festivities will take place from October 15thto 22nd in Sibiu.
Astra has become one of the main platforms for documentary cinema in Romania and Eastern Europe and its success is due to the great diversity of the documentaries screened. By not categorising films into subject-matter, genre or format, the festival attracts creative film-makers.
Again this year the festival offers four competitions: the Romania Competition, the Central and Eastern Europe Competition, New Voices in Documentary Cinema and the Docschool Competition. In total, more than 43 films will be screened.
This year the Romania Competition offers 11 films dealing with subjects linked to Romania, whether produced locally or not. Together they offer “an updated x-ray of society, in all its complexity.” Among the titles in competition, Diana Gavra’s Amar focuses on pickpockets. By following several of them at work her film shows the daily lives of these people and their petty thefts.
The New Voices in Documentary Cinema Competition is open to international films, offering a selection of new-generation film-makers whose work is marked by an individual style. There are nine films in competition, among them the Moroccan Mother of all Lies by Asmae El Moudir, an autobiographical documentary in which the director looks at the relationship between her family’s past and her country’s recent history in an expressive, tragic way.
The whole programme of the Astra Film Festival is available on their web-site.
Sources: Cineuropa, Astra Film Festival
