Freiburger Filmforum - Festival of Transcultural Cinema

The 22nd edition of the FREIBURGER FILMFORUM — FESTIVAL OF TRANSCULTURAL CINEMA will take place from May 4 to 9, 2027. From now on until September 30, 2026, we warmly invite you to submit your works to the CALL FOR ENTRIES or this year's special focus, LINES OF PLAY, to our Students' Platform!

ABOUT THE STUDENTS' PLATFORM

Since 1985, the forum has been dedicated to screening films that sensitively portray current, historical, socio-political, and cultural phenomena. Established in 2015, the Students’ Platform emerged as a parallel program that engages with the lived realities and experiences of young and emerging filmmakers that are developing experimental, and socio-politically engaged cinema practices.

The Students’ Platform invites works from student and debut filmmakers, media artists, and visual anthropologists from across the world, with the aim of foregrounding the diversity, creativity, and critical engagement of the next generation of filmmakers. Rather than functioning as a competition, the Students’ Platform exists as a forum for dialogue, reflection, and exchange. Screenings are accompanied by in-depth discussions where filmmakers engage with audiences, practitioners, researchers, and fellow artists.

Our understanding of a “student” extends beyond institutional frameworks. We consider studentship as a position of learning, unlearning, experimentation, and risk-taking. Anyone who considers themselves a student of cinema, regardless of background or age, is welcome to submit.

The Debut section considers the first feature-length film made by a filmmaker. Through the coexistence of student films and debut features, the Students’ Platform hopes to foster conversations around long-term artistic and cinematic engagement, evolving practices, and the challenges of sustained filmmaking.

For the CALL FOR ENTRIES, we welcome works that critically and creatively respond to the complexities of our world through diverse cinematic forms, anthropological inquiries, personal narratives, collective practices, and formal experimentation.

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For some editions of the festival, we also develope a Special Focus within the Students' Platform. This year, we bring an exciting new program that looks at filmmaking practices through a playful and yet critical lens. For more information, kindly read the text below.

LINES OF PLAY

In a moment marked by intensifying crises, political spectacle, algorithmic mediation, and competing claims to truth, there is often an expectation that critical cinema must respond through gravity, urgency, and solemnity. While such responses remain necessary, they are not the only ways of engaging the world. This year’s special focus turns toward play, humour, experimentation, and mischief as equally significant modes of political and artistic practice.

Refusing the binary between seriousness and frivolity, the program calls for films that explore how laughter, absurdity, performance, speculation, and improvisation can function as forms of inquiry. Rather than offering an escape from contemporary realities, they engage with them through detours, exaggerations, games, fictions, and unexpected encounters. These works reveal how play can expose contradictions, unsettle authority, create alternative forms of knowledge, and open spaces for collective imagination.

The focus is also informed by an understanding of studentship that extends beyond formal institutions. To be a student is not simply to learn established knowledge but to remain open to uncertainty, experimentation, and the possibility of failure. It involves following unexpected paths, making unlikely connections, and developing methods that may not yet have a recognised place within existing structures. In this sense, play becomes a way of thinking, researching, and making.

Across documentary, experimental, fiction, animated, and hybrid forms, this call for films embraces anthropological wandering rather than fixed destinations. Films that move rhizomatically across disciplines, aesthetics, and political concerns, generating connections that are provisional, playful, and transformative. We invite filmmakers to consider how cinema might not only represent the world, but also rehearse other possibilities within it through humour, curiosity, collective invention, and the productive potential of not always knowing where one is going.